Paris

2001 · Jean-Pierre Jeunet · 122 min · Romantic Comedy

Amelie is pure cinematic joy wrapped in accordion music and golden-green light. Audrey Tautou's performance anchors a film that could easily float away on its own whimsy, and Jean-Pierre Jeunet's visual imagination produces something that looks and feels like nothing else. The love story is thin and the version of Paris on display is more fairy tale than reality, but neither of those things stops the film from working its charm. Two decades later, people still fall in love with this movie, and it's easy to understand why.

1944 · W. Somerset Maugham · 314 pages · Literary Fiction

The Razor's Edge is Maugham's quietly devastating study of a man searching for meaning in a world obsessed with status, written with the deceptive simplicity that marks all his finest work.

1926 · Ernest Hemingway · 251 pages · Literary Fiction

The Sun Also Rises is the novel that made Hemingway and defined a generation's literary voice. Its influence on American prose is so pervasive that reading it today can make it seem simpler than it actually is, because the style it pioneered became the default. Underneath the drinking and the parties and the bullfights is a novel about people who have been broken by the war and are trying, with limited success, to figure out what's left. Jake's narration is a masterpiece of restraint. Brett is unforgettable and infuriating. The Pamplona chapters are electric. If you can read past the surface, there's more going on here than most novels manage with twice the words.

2011 · Martin Scorsese · 126 min · Adventure / Drama / Family

Hugo is Martin Scorsese making a children's film that doubles as an argument for why cinema matters, and the result is something too unusual to fit neatly into any category. The 3D cinematography is among the best ever produced, Paris in the 1930s is rendered with genuine wonder, and the film's emotional payoff around the history of early filmmaking is surprisingly powerful. The first half struggles with pacing as it establishes its clockwork mystery, and younger audiences may find the extended love letter to silent cinema more educational than exciting. It's a beautiful, heartfelt, slightly uneven film that finds Scorsese operating far outside his comfort zone with more success than he's often given credit for.

2022 · Lucy Foley · 368 pages · Thriller

Lucy Foley's Parisian thriller about a woman searching for her missing half-brother in a building full of suspicious neighbors delivers atmosphere and a sharp sense of place while relying on a formula that increasingly shows its seams. The rotating perspectives create tension but also dilute it, and the mystery's resolution is competent without being surprising. It's a solid airplane read that doesn't pretend to be more.

2020 · 4 Seasons · Netflix · Romantic Comedy

Emily in Paris is a show that practically dares you to criticize it and then makes you watch another episode anyway. Darren Star built a frothy, gorgeous, and intentionally uncomplicated Parisian fantasy that functions perfectly as background viewing or a guilty-pleasure binge. Lily Collins is charming in the lead, the fashion is stunning, and Paris has never looked more like a postcard. The writing is thin, the cultural commentary is surface-level, and the romantic plots cycle endlessly, but the show knows exactly what it is and refuses to apologize for it.