In excruciating conversations over drinks around the city, during the fourteen months that Renata Adler served as film critic for The New York Times, I often found myself serving, by a whoosh of role suction, as her apologist. When anyone else present seemed prepared to champion her critical honor, I'd find myself laying back. Even after a heavy artillery barrage, my reinforcements were timid and lackluster….
Now Random House has published all her Times stuff (January, 1968–February, 1969) virtually unreedited, in the precise order of its appearance—nearly two hundred complete pieces of writing: daily reviews, Sunday essays, movie-oriented reports from New York, Paris, Rome, Venice, Rochester and Havana—under the title A Year in the Dark.
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Read the rest of this Criticism with our Adler, Renata 1938–: Critical Essay by Jacob Brackman Access Pass.
