Reviews

February 20, 2024

Oppenheimer and a Future Worth Waiting For

I remember looking at all the social media reactions of critics and friends who had seen Oppenheimer, now up for a Best Picture Oscar. So many of them described walking out of the movie “devastated” and “depressed.” Continue Reading...

February 08, 2024

Ferrari: The Need for Speed … and Beauty

Michael Mann is famous for crime dramas like Thief (1981), Heat (1995), and Collateral (2004) that suggest that only criminals can be free, since the rest of us are constantly bossed around. Continue Reading...

January 10, 2024

The Curse of The Iron Claw

Four decades ago, the American director Robert Aldrich made the most cheerful, companionable, and charitable movie ever produced about professional wrestling. Against all expectations, Aldrich—the grand master of the grotesque on the basis of such cartoonishly misanthropic masterpieces as Kiss Me Deadly, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Continue Reading...

December 22, 2023

Going My Way: An Enduring True Fairy Tale

Every Christmas, I try to write about Christmas movies, especially about old Hollywood, because the best directors at the time considered it worthwhile to make movies that would chastise and cheer up the nation, indeed remind people of the spirit of Christmas and thus try to fit Christianity into the new entertainment that dominated the American imagination. Continue Reading...

December 14, 2023

The Holdovers and the Odor of Sanctity

When it comes to film genres, the kinds, the sorts, the categories of picture defined by certain conventions and characteristics, we’re all familiar with sci fi, the western, the detective crime drama, the war epic, fantasy, comedy (which includes mini-genres like rom-com, absurdist (think Airplane! Continue Reading...

December 05, 2023

The Little Corporal Gets a Little Film

Among all art forms, the movies have the greatest propensity to glorify violence, brutality, and savagery of all sorts. Because the medium is inherently kinetic, cinema captures the thrill, terror, and barbarism of battle; and because it is empathetic, cinema trains audiences to identify with and immerse themselves in the action they’re shown onscreen. Continue Reading...

November 21, 2023

The Resurrections of Doctor Who: Why the Time Lord Has Endured for 60 Years

The publicists at the BBC weren’t thrilled, one imagines, when their Doctor Who leading man spoke candidly about why he loved the program so much. “People always ask me, ‘What is it about the show that appeals so broadly?’” Continue Reading...

November 07, 2023

Golda: The Right Leader at the Right Time

On the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Yom Kippur War, Hamas launched an attack on Israel, killing more than 1,500 people and taking hostages, committing, filming, and publicizing on social media acts of terror that the citizens of democracies are simply unprepared to watch or understand. Continue Reading...

October 26, 2023

Scorsese’s Moral Vision Shines Through Killers of the Flower Moon

What do we think about when we think about Martin Scorsese? Many of us think about gangster stories, especially ultra-violent, grisly, and operatic ones. He helped bring the genre into the modern age with his masterpieces Mean Streets, Goodfellas, Casino, and The Departed. Continue Reading...

October 11, 2023

Tom Wolfe and the Strangeness of America

Conservatism doesn’t really produce or nurture writers nowadays. The notable exception in the past couple of generations is Tom Wolfe, who died in 2018. Wolfe was universally beloved. He sold millions of copies of his various writings. Continue Reading...

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