In a new installment of the Critics at Large advice hotline, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz field calls from listeners on a variety of cultural dilemmas, and offer recommendations for what ails them. Callers’ concerns run the gamut from the lighthearted to the existential; several seek works to help ease the sting of the state of the world. “I can’t say that we will solve those deeper issues,” Cunningham says. “But to share art with somebody is to offer them a companion.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

The New York Issue of The New Yorker (May 12 & 19, 2025)
“Birds of America,” by Lorrie Moore
“Eighth Grade” (2018)
“Gilead,” by Marilynne Robinson
“Danny, the Champion of the World,” by Roald Dahl
“Midnight Diner” (2016-19)
“Sentimental Education,” by Gustave Flaubert
“Middlemarch,” by George Eliot
“My Life in Middlemarch,” by Rebecca Mead
“How the Method Made Acting Modern,” by Alexandra Schwartz (The New Yorker)
Charles Schulz’s “Peanuts”
“First Reformed” (2017)
“Better Things” (2016-22)
“The Functionally Dysfunctional Matriarchy of ‘Better Things,’ ” by Alexandra Schwartz (The New Yorker)
“Odes,” by Sharon Olds
TJ Douglas’s “Dying”
Mozart’s “The Magic Flute”
“Peppa Pig” (2004—)
Aaron Copland’s “Billy the Kid”
Dennis Wilson’s “Pacific Ocean Blue”
Caetano Veloso’s “Ofertório”
Crosby, Stills & Nash’s début album

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

The vampire has long been a way to explore the shadow side of society, and “Sinners,” Ryan Coogler’s new blockbuster set in the Jim Crow-era South, is no exception. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss what “Sinners,” which fuses historical realism with monster-movie-style horror, illuminates about America in 2025. They trace the archetype from such nineteenth-century texts as “The Vampyre” and “Dracula” to the “Twilight” moment of the aughts, when Edward Cullen, an ethical bloodsucker committed to abstinence, turned the vampire from a predatory outsider into a Y.A. heartthrob. What do he and his ilk have to say today? “The vampire is the one who can unsettle our notions, and maybe give us new notions,” Cunningham says. “The vampire comes in and asks, ‘But have you considered this?’ ”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Sinners” (2025)
“Black Panther” (2018)
“The Vampyre,” by John Polidori
“In the Blood,” by Joan Acocella (The New Yorker)
“Dracula,” by Bram Stoker
“Dracula” (1931)
“Love at First Bite” (1979)
“The Lost Boys” (1987)
“True Blood” (2008–14)
“Twilight” (2008)
“What We Do in the Shadows” (2019–24)

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

For nearly as long as we’ve been waging war, we’ve sought ways to chronicle it. “Warfare,” a new movie co-directed by the filmmaker Alex Garland and the former Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza, takes an unorthodox approach, recreating a disastrous real-life mission in Iraq according to Mendoza’s own memories and those of the soldiers who fought alongside him. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss how “Warfare” ’s visceral account brings us closer to a certain kind of truth, while also creating a space into which viewers can project their own ideologies. The hosts consider how artists have historically portrayed conflict and its aftermath—referencing Virginia Woolf’s depiction of a shell-shocked soldier in “Mrs. Dalloway” and Vietnam-era classics such as “Apocalypse Now” and “Full Metal Jacket”—and how “Warfare,” with its emphasis on firsthand experience, marks a departure from much of what came before. “That personal tinge to me seems to be characteristic of the age,” Cunningham says. “Part of the emotional appeal is, This happened, and I’m telling you. It’s not diaristic—but it is testimonial.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Warfare” (2025)
“Apocalypse Now” (1979)
“Full Metal Jacket” (1987)
“Beau Travail” (1999)
“Saving Private Ryan” (1998)
“The Hurt Locker” (2008)
“Zero Dark Thirty” (2012)
“Barry” (2018–23)
“Mrs. Dalloway,” by Virginia Woolf
“In Flanders Fields,” by John McCrae

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.