Wesley Morris in The Times: “When Beyoncé explored love-pain, she called her project ‘Lemonade.’ When Lopez does it, heartache becomes cardio, lots of sweating and suffering and boxing and panting and heaving. You admire the shape of her body as much as you mourn her emotional discontent. It’s ‘Lululemonade.’” (Thanks to Josh Futterman, Manhattan, and Allen Tarlow, West Hollywood, Calif., among others, for nominating this.)
Anne Branigin in The Washington Post: “It will certainly take home the trophy for The Most J-Lo Thing J-Lo Has Ever Done. In it, she’s the magnetic center of the universe: She sings, she dances, she channels all of her rom-com superpowers — she even raps. It is her Magnum Lopez.” (Virginia Matish, Chesapeake, Va.)
Wesley also weighed in recently on a very different kind of performer in a very different kind of movie, appraising Paul Giamatti’s Oscar-nominated performance in “The Holdovers” as a profoundly — but not hopelessly — embittered prep school teacher: “You can measure the emotional magnitude of his righteousness by the creases, lines and squiggles that striate Giamatti’s forehead. What he’s after is richer than plain fury. Yes, he can give you Vesuvius. But here, in the most deeply inhabited, most sharply etched use to which that brow has yet been put, Giamatti has also located Lake Placid and charts a course toward it.” (Bonnie Oberman, Chicago, and Doug Sterner, Fort Lauderdale, Fla., among others)
Sticking with The Times, John McWhorter had some translingual fun with the first person plural: “In the Kwaio language of the Solomon Islands, the word for ‘we’ differs depending on whether you mean yourself and the person you’re talking to or yourself and someone else. There are also different words for ‘we’ if you are talking about yourself and three people including whom you are talking to or three people not including whom you are talking to or more than three people. Kwaio can leave an English speaker with we-ness envy.” (Sheldon Seidenfeld, Teaneck, N.J., and Keith Friedlander, Lloyd Harbor, N.Y., among many others)
Dwight Garner marveled at the writer Carson McCullers’s daily pharmaceutical intake as described in a new biography of her: “The lists of pills fill entire paragraphs. She must have rattled when she walked.” (Sally Hinson, Greer, S.C., and John Jacoby, Cambridge, Mass.)
