by The Editors
January 27, 2025
We are a quarter of the way through the new century, and the state of high culture is not what it should be. Individuals are no less brilliant, but there is a clear institutional lack. It’s as if the great publishers, film producers, and record labels can no longer provide us the artistic nourishment that…
by Sam Jennings
August 28, 2026
The hottest, driest summer on record is coming to an end, and all through the digital ether the call is going out: “THE MOVIES ARE BACK. THE MOVIES ARE BACK.” This month marks my first year as film critic at The Metropolitan Review, so perhaps it’s time to editorialize and examine the claim. Are “the movies”…
August 26, 2026
The coroner said the manner of death was suicide, with “blunt or injury to the head, trunk and extremities.” The dead man’s coworkers probably heard the crunch of breaking bones as his body hit the floor from stories above in the Amazon warehouse. It’s a strange sound, human bones cracking, hard to place, and it…
August 22, 2026
I’d told Delahaye that I was done stealing cars, or at least done stealing whole cars. Carjacking was a noble trade once upon a time, with a mannered and cordial community around it. Even considering the ideological schism between the whole-hog hotwire or key-fob clone artists and the more targeted hubcap and wheel men, who…
August 21, 2026
The initial pleasure of an Éric Rohmer film is the pleasure of a beautiful face. The initial response of any viewer is a dazed enchantment with his titillating aesthetics. The faces, yes, but also the French landscape and the youthful, lithe bodies that populate it. Despite its name, even Rohmer’s A Tale of Winter begins with tones…
August 20, 2026
Richard Russo fans will recognize some familiar markers of his fiction in his latest novel, Under the Falls. The setting is a landscape of physical, economic, and emotional desolation — Stone Mountain, a hardscrabble, down-on-its-luck upstate New York town where the old lakeside amusement park rides are dismantled and rusting. This is “a place that doesn’t yield…
by Carter Vance
August 16, 2026
I was a great collaborator with / wartime cigarettes, an artist / with the conical scream-sighs / of life under bombardment. / I trust you more under / a broken street lamp, under / a shattered sky space, / where time stills / Than I ever did at dinner / tables pushed together on /…
August 14, 2026
For some of us avid readers, the joy of reading novels is nearly matched by the pleasure of recommending them to our most simpatico friends. Thoughtful criticism can play this role writ large. I can still remember the reviewers who first stimulated my interest in particular authors: Martin Amis’ collected reviews of various J. G….
August 12, 2026
AT THE END OF MARCH, I was sitting at a departure gate at JFK, having endured a brutal frigid winter exiled upstate in a yurt in the woods, about to fly to Tokyo to bury my maternal grandmother, when I got a strange and unusual email. From a woman, Kirstie, who said she lived in…
by Ross Barkan
August 11, 2026
What is the state of American literature today? This loaded question never has an easy answer, and invariably the debate grows tedious, ideological and sociological combatants racing to their predictable corners, fists wearily raised. In my years as a novelist and columnist and now editor-in-chief of this publication, I’ve come to believe that large, conglomerate…