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Punk-rock nostalgia has an oxymoronic quality. Ah, the toasty, cozy good old days…of shooting up in the bathroom at Cbgb as the Dead Boys lay waste to Western Civilization onstage! Sid Vicious, we hardly knew ye! Yet the nostalgia for punk, as much of a contradiction as it can seem, has only grown with the decades. That’s partly because punk, with its assaultive immediacy and defiant not-niceness, now seems like the quintessence of the pre-digital world. In these pandemic and social-media times, direct human contact is something many of us are starved for, and punk was a bumper-car ride of human contact. The bands were in your face, you were in their face, and everyone was in the face of the beer-guzzling stooge next to them. It’s no surprise that this is what some people now crave.

If you’re a person who gets misty-eyed when you...

That South Korean director Park Chan-wook is interested in revenge should come as no surprise to anyone with even a passing familiarity with his work. After the box-office smash Joint Security Area (2000), he proceeded to make what is now collectively known as “The Vengeance Trilogy": Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002); Oldboy (2003), the most well-known entry; and Lady Vengeance (2005). For a while, though, it would seem to explain why The Little Drummer Girl (1983), of all of John le Carré’s spy novels—and not, say, A Perfect Spy, the masterpiece that directly followed it—captured Park’s long-standing interest, eventually culminating in a lavish, six-episode mini-series.Set in 1979 against the backdrop of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the series opens with a terrorist attack on a Jewish diplomatic residence in Bad Godesberg, West Germany. In a sinuous, ticking-clock set-piece, a leather briefcase—seen in the opening shot, as well at the close of...

For understandable reasons, there wasn’t a lot of anticipation in the air for Lou Reed’s 1976 album Coney Island Baby. His latest release at the time, 1975’s Metal Machine Music, was seen as a deliberate act of career suicide. Consisting of 64 minutes of abrasive feedback, the album contained no vocals or anything that could be recognized as music. “If this album is Reed’s Self Portrait, then we may have to tolerate a lot of stroboscopic sludge before he gets back on the tracks,” wrote Rolling Stone‘s James Wolcott.