A collection of 101 posts
I grew up in the 1960s and ’70s and I’m happy to report that, for the most part, television and mainstream cinema today are orders of magnitude better than they were in my salad days.
Something is flattened when our understanding of art is asked to serve the logic of a medical diagnosis, which sees the messiness of the human condition as a malady to be cured.
It has been 30 years since a Western last won the Best Picture Oscar at the Academy Awards. That was in 1992 and the film was Unforgiven, directed by Clint Eastwood, who also starred in it alongside Morgan Freeman, Gene Hackman, and Richard Harris. On Sunday, Jane Campion’s The
In Shakespeare’s play, the Weïrd Sisters undoubtedly spur Macbeth toward evil by tempting him toward his dark ambition.
You’ve probably heard of the Toronto International Film Festival, which, before the pandemic, was annually attracting almost 500,000 attendees. But you’ve probably never heard of Toronto’s equally venerable Cineforum, whose weekly attendance has usually been closer to five. The Cineforum is an indie theatre run by
Although the vaudeville circuits would last through the 1920s, the way was now paved for impressive purpose-built movie houses with proper lighting and sound that would exhibit first-rate popular entertainment to general audiences.
Sam Peckinpah’s ‘Straw Dogs’ at 50.
This month brings us the release of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. No, not the film. That came out in 2019. But now HarperCollins is publishing a novelization, written by Tarantino himself, and based on the earlier film. This particular type of fiction—the bastard offspring
Jewison, by contrast, had found himself both “curiously moved” and “flooded with exciting visual images” upon first hearing the album.
Sidney Poitier, who retired from acting 20 years ago, turned in many unforgettable screen performances over a career that spanned the entire second half of the 20th century. But his best known is almost certainly his portrayal of police officer Virgil Tibbs, the protagonist of Norman Jewison’s 1967 film
There is no doubt that part of the goal of Allen v. Farrow was to finish off both Allen’s career and his legacy by presenting a definitive guilty verdict in the court of public opinion.
On March 4th, the Ringer, a website that covers pop culture, featured an article entitled “We’re in a Time Loop of Time-Loop Movies.” Similar articles have appeared in many other pop-culture venues of late. Suddenly, time-loop stories seem to be everywhere. This month Hulu began streaming director Joe Carnahan’
If heaven needs to be segregated, what hope does Earth have?
It is difficult to believe in heaven, but it is also difficult not to believe in a heaven.
Hard as it might be to believe, the years that stretched from roughly 1967 through the bicentennial year of 1976 brought even more foment, outrage, unrest, and upheaval to America than the most recent decade has managed. The escalation of the Vietnam War, the student protests against that war, the