Steven Spielberg’s Aliens

Eyes deceive in Steven Spielberg’s latest blockbuster. Disclosure Day, the storied director’s fifth film in which humans encounter aliens, hinges on characters adjusting their literal and metaphysical views as they experience the unknown. The truth is out there, and if the heroes can outrun a shadowy corporation, traumatic pasts, and mysterious phenomena, they can catch up to it. In this way, the film is classic Spielberg: a widescreen spectacle grounded in both the wondrous sensation of feeling one’s world expand and the challenge of acting on that epiphany. Read Stephen Kearse’s “Steven Spielberg’s Aliens”

Rockwell Kent’s View From Greenland

Fifty-year-old Rockwell Kent had been living on Greenland for months. “Painting; painting incessantly,” he logged in Salamina, one of three diaristic memoirs about his time on the island. “Pursuing beauty in bewilderment of its profusion, greedy to get in one short year the whole of what might thrill a man a lifetime.” Kent found his pursuit stymied, though, by the “preposterous moving-picture outfit” that had “settled on the district like a locust blight.” To some hapless crew member, he gave an earful: “Your being here affects my work about as my running in on all your shots would affect yours.” Read Andrew Holter’s “Rockwell Kent’s View From Greenland”