A Secret
Running time 105 minutes
Written by Claude Miller and Natalie Carter
Directed by Claude Miller
Starring Cécile De France, Patrick Bruel, Ludivine Sagnier, Mathieu Amalric

Claude Miller’s A Secret, from a screenplay by Mr. Miller and Natalie Carter, based on Philippe Grimbert’s autobiographical novel Un Secret, retitled in its English translation Memory, a Novel, transcends the perhaps perceived banality of still another film about the Holocaust with a marvelously nuanced narrative floating through time with memorable characters who never beg for our pity. Yet it touches on the ultimate horror of this insane period in world history by focusing not so much on the toll taken of the dead, but on the toll taken of the living survivors wracked with their life-blighting guilt.

BOTTLE SHOCK
RUNNING TIME 110 minutes
WRITTEN By Jody Savin, Ross Schwartz, and Randall Miller
DIRECTED BY Randall Miller
STARRING Bill Pullman, Alan Rickman, Chris Pine, Freddy Rodriguez, Rachael Taylor

Two things I can count on every August: Movies get lousier than they were all year, and I go on vacation. This time, it’s different. I’m still taking a month off, but there are some big surprises at the movies. Most of them are unexpected and underpublicized, some of them boast low budgets and high rewards, a few of them need to be added to your must-see list, and you can start with Bottle Shock, a marvelous, beautifully made, feel-good movie that is guaranteed to revive everyone’s flagging faith in American pride at home and abroad—something in these sorry, perilous times we’re desperately short of.

It seems, to us at least, that a truly great romantic comedy is getting harder and harder to find at the movies these days. We’re unabashed fans of the genre—from the classics like The Philadelphia Story to this year’s (underappreciated) Definitely, Maybe, and tons of stuff in between. Heck, we even kinda liked 27 Dresses! However, if there’s one thing to be learned from seeing lots and lots of these movies, it is that nothing is as insufferable as a romantic comedy that doesn’t work. (Hiya, Made of Honor and P.S. I Love You!) And such is unfortunately the case with this weekend’s Everybody Wants to Be Italian.

Why do we go to the theater? Put it another way: Why, oh why, do we go to the theater? It frequently frustrates and disappoints us. And it’s expensive. Yet we keep going, come what may.

But look at it from the point of view of the people who work in theater. It frequently frustrates and disappoints them. And it’s expensive for them, too, because as a general rule of thumb they’re criminally underpaid.

Theater folk are the ones who subsidize the theater the most. So I was delighted by a peach of a line about their fatal attraction to a precarious life, one that comes in the last minutes of A.

Context plays an important role in art. This is particularly true of sculpture; it’s a medium that engages real space—that is to say, a place and our relationship to it.

Philip Grausman’s Susanna and Eileen (1996-1999), two monumental fiberglass sculptures, are on display on the grounds of the Katonah Museum of Art—Susanna on the grassy hill leading up to the entryway, and Eileen in the rear patio.

I couldn’t help but wonder what Mr. Grausman’s portrait-heads would look like at, say, MoMA. Both measure roughly 10 feet high and require a significant amount of viewing distance—they could, I think, command MoMA’s enormous contemporary galleries without strain, and maybe with finesse.

“Where’s the noodle man?”

When my son was a boy, he loved to watch the noodle man at Honmura An, the only authentic soba restaurant in the city. The noodle man worked in a glass booth in the dining room, where he’d pummel the dough, toss it in the air and roll it out, never once making a hole. Then, using an enormous carving knife, he’d slice the dough into perfect, foot-long strands that he hung up to dry.

Honmura An closed last year, leaving its fans bereft. But now soba cuisine has returned with Matsugen, Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s new Japanese restaurant in Tribeca.

The Park Avenue Armory, that massive Victorian hulk situated between 66th and 67th streets, is well known for hosting the Annual Winter Antiques Show, where a well-heeled crowd enjoys its elegant preview parties, Young Collectors’ nights, and other pleasant rituals. Earlier this month, however, its cavernous Drill Hall was transformed for an event that demanded a rather different sort of ambiance—more like a Dantean circle of hell: The Lincoln Center Festival used it to present five performances of Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s 1965 opera Die Soldaten (The Soldiers).

If you haven’t heard of this opera, then you haven’t heard of its composer, either.

What do we expect from something called Romeo and Juliet—or, as in the case of Mark Morris’ new version, Romeo & Juliet, On Motifs of Shakespeare? We’ve all read it, seen it, heard the operas, watched the movies, enjoyed (or not) West Side Story. And then, of course, there are all the dance versions: Lavrovsky, MacMillan, Cranko and, if we’re lucky enough to have seen them, Ashton and Tudor. It’s embedded in our minds—and in ballet. The two roles almost all young ballerinas most eagerly hope to dance are Giselle and … Juliet.

Why? The scintillating verse of the young Shakespeare doesn’t explain this story’s grip on the world’s—or the dancer’s—imagination.

Sarah Palin has shot, killed and bagged more animals than you’ve eaten, so sister girlfriends, we beg you, can we shatter the glass ceiling some other time? Like, not at the Republican convention? Because we have spring fashion trends to concentrate on, and they include tightness and shortness (and starvation, yippee!). But if you wish to escape a weeklong offensive of curdled blog posts about fetid Fashion Week parties you’re not invited to and wouldn’t attend even if you were, Film Forum offers free air-conditioning and total darkness during the U.S. premiere of acclaimed director Chris Smith’s The Pool, a fable shot in

Nothing to Be Frightened Of
By Julian Barnes
Alfred A. Knopf, 244 pages, $24.95

I’m borderline obsessed by Philip Larkin’s poem “Aubade.” It’s a pitiless meditation on death; a frank confession of fear; a swift rebuke to religion (“That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade”); and a weary recognition that despite the dread moment of personal extinction, life will go on—dawn will come again:

Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.

I’m particularly hung up on the word “rented.” We live in a rented world—and the landlord, alas, can evict us without any notice whatsoever.

In Nothing to Be Frightened Of, his own meandering, book-length meditation on mortality, Julian Barnes calls “Aubade” Larkin’s “great death-poem.

Stories
By Doris Lessing
Everyman’s Library, 696 pages, $26

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature as he neared 70, George Bernard Shaw dismissed it as a lifebelt thrown to a swimmer after he has reached the shore. When Doris Lessing got her Nobel last fall—at 88, the oldest person ever to win it—her reaction was as dismissive, saying that she had won “every other bloody prize.” As a writer who had been publishing one book after another for nearly 60 years, Ms. Lessing had long since triumphantly reached the shores of literary success. And in a very real sense, the literature Nobel, notable for ignoring so many of the best writers (starting with Tolstoy in its first 10 awards!), needed her to ornament it far more than she needed it to put a final stamp of approval on a remarkable body of work.

American Wife
By Curtis Sittenfeld
Random House, 558 pages, $26

With American Wife, Curtis Sittenfeld has deftly crossed an extraordinarily high wire: She’s written a book in the voice of a someone we all know, and we come out of it thinking not about whether she got it right but rather why it seems here and there just the tiniest bit wrong. This may sound like a backhanded compliment, but I mean it as a straightforward one. A poorly executed version of the novel would grate with each false note, causing you—O.K., me—to scribble furiously in the margins: THIS is wrong, THIS is unbelievable, THIS is stupid.

The Spy’s Bedside Book
Edited by Graham Greene and Hugh Greene
Bantam, 252 pages, $12

While Graham Greene and his brother Hugh were compiling The Spy’s Bedside Book, a medley of vignettes of spycraft drawn from fiction, memoirs and historical documents first published in 1957 and now reissued just in time, it seems, for the return of the Cold War, they stumbled upon the deep explanation for why tales of espionage cast so strong a spell over their readers: "I wonder how many would be able to detect truth from fiction in this anthology," Graham writes in the introduction, "if the editors had not printed the names of the contributors.

Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts About Alternative Medicine
By Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst
W.W. Norton, 352 pages, $25.95

The yearly global expenditure on alternative medicine is $77 billion. To put that number in perspective, consider that the National Institutes of Health 2009 budget for H.I.V./AIDS research is not quite $3 billion, and that Croatia’s gross domestic product is about $51 billion. Granted, if you believe that back-cracking and pin-pricking, energizing lotions and herbal potions actually work, then it’s not unreasonable for the spending on such remedies to exceed a European country’s G.D.P. But in that case—at least according to Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst, authors of Trick or Treatment—you’re a sucker.

Devout fans of Marilynne Robinson—those still astonished, nearly three decades later, by the poetry of Housekeeping (1980), and those who made the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead (2004) into an unlikely best seller—will be thrilled by Home (FSG, $25), which is essentially a second serving of Gilead, though a trifle less intense, softened by the gentle presence of a female protagonist. We’re back in Gilead, Iowa, in the mid-1950s, and we’re as drenched as ever in religion; once again there’s a father figure who’s a preacher, and a complex father-son bond—but this time there’s also Glory, a 38-year-old daughter who’s come home to care for her father, and ends up caring for a black-sheep brother who’s drifted home, too.