Sergio Lopez

MARTYRS HAVE IT easy, thinks Cyrus Shams, the 20-something protagonist of Kaveh Akbar’s debut novel. “Why should the Prophet Muhammad get a whole visit from an archangel? Why should Saul get to see the literal light of heaven on the road to Damascus?” At least they had clarity and purpose, Cyrus reasons.

In Akbar’s Martyr!, Cyrus, a first-generation Iranian immigrant, is an aspiring poet and martyr. His problem, he thinks, is that he doesn’t know what to die for.

Cyrus’ mother Roya was killed when she was a passenger on a jet that was shot down by a U.S. warship (inspired by the real-life downing of Iran Air Flight 655). Her death leaves a gaping wound in the Shams family: Cyrus is haunted by survivor guilt and his father self-medicates with alcohol. Martyr! is in part a meditation on the inherited weight of history and grief.

This burden seems particularly true for immigrants in the U.S. — or anyone who carries the weight of multiple identities. Sociologist and activist W.E.B. Du Bois wrote about the “double consciousness” of Black Americans, who have historically carried within themselves at minimum two narratives: the American dream as well as the nightmare.

TOWARD THE END of the film documenting the performance of Aretha Franklin’s album Amazing Grace, the singer sits at a church piano. Like so many times in her childhood, she begins playing — gradually, almost tentatively — the opening chords to “Never Grow Old.” It was her first single, released when she was 14. As she sings of “a land where we’ll never grow old,” built by “Jesus on high,” folks in the audience — including gospel pioneer Clara Ward — cannot help but get up and dance. “Never, never never” — and then a Franklin trademark: mmm-mmm-mmm — “never grow old,” she testifies. You believe her.

This year, Aretha’s Amazing Grace turned 50. The album — recorded live at New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles with James Cleveland’s Southern California Community Choir and one of the greatest backing bands in all of pop music history — blends and crosses boundaries of genre, generation, race, and class. In 1972, Amazing Grace was not just a return to Aretha’s roots, but a vision of a future — one rooted in the Black experience in the U.S.

The liner notes credited Gene Paul as “assisting engineer.” Today, he is a legendary producer. Paul traces the genesis of Amazing Grace to Aretha’s 1972 record Young, Gifted and Black. That album’s title track, penned and first sung by Nina Simone, was a breakthrough in the civil rights and Black pride movements. “In the whole world you know / there’s a million boys and girls / who are young, gifted and Black,” the lyrics proclaim. While recording Young, Gifted and Black, Paul told Sojourners, Aretha began to conceptualize the live recording of a gospel album as a follow-up. When she thought of the potential project, Paul said, she “was smiling, captivated.” To Paul, there is a clear through line from Young, Gifted and Black to Amazing Grace: The former spoke to the contemporary Black political moment; the latter looked back in time while pulling her spiritual and cultural roots into the present. Both pointed the way to a Black future that was joyous and free.

Despite the discomfort some viewers might feel from the film’s visceral violence, Nightmare Alley is ultimately an old-fashioned morality tale, one in which del Toro refuses to let his central character escape the weight and judgment of his own actions. The film barrels towards the moment when Stan’s schemes fall apart with unrelenting brutality, and eventually Stan’s machinations begin to unravel. Nightmare Alley also thrills in the strong performances of characters: Cate Blanchett’s Dr. Lilith Ritter, cool and unflappable, always in control even when she seems not to be; Toni Collette’s Zeena, whose love is more complex than it initially appears.