Cynthia Grenier is a cultural journalist and critic who contributed essays and reviews to The Weekly Standard between 2003 and 2010. Her pieces for the magazine ranged across film, culture, and personalities, covering subjects from Hollywood memoirs to Iraqi cinema. Based in part on her wide-ranging interests, her work also touched on topics from Annapolis life to agricultural culture.
Quincy Jones, who once roomed with Herman Leonard in Paris, wrote of him: “When people think of jazz, their mental picture is likely one of Herman’s.” All certainly true of the wonderfully talented photographer who died in California two months ago at 87. Strictly speaking, there can be no jazz…
Cambridge, Mass.
Passing a newsstand not long ago on K Street in Washington, I was startled to spot the cover of a recent issue of Playboy. "Red-Hot Russian Sex Bombs" proclaimed the cover line above a photograph of a slim blonde-headed young woman wearing a white fur chapka, and demurely holding a large matching…
Last summer, when Oprah re-launched her book club by promoting three of William Faulkner's novels--As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, and Light in August--I had to wonder what on earth he would have thought of it. To say nothing of a full-page ad in the New York Times telling readers they…
Never Let Me Go
SAY WHAT YOU WILL, there is a kind of exquisite irony about the record-breaking show of "Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre" at Washington's National Gallery having Time Warner as its corporate sponsor. The more than 340 works created primarily by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec include not merely…
REMEMBER THIS NAME: BAHMAN Ghobadi. He is a Kurdish director/writer living in Iran. His third and latest film, Turtles Can Fly, is festooned, and justly so, with tributes and honors from international film festivals, as well as having been nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at this year's…
MAY 5 WAS A DARK, DOUR DAY as some 180 men out of the 1946 class of 1,000--500 members having passed away in the intervening years, including my late husband, Richard in 2002--made their early morning way into the chapel of the U.S. Naval Academy for a memorial service.
My Life So Far
The Way It's Never Been Done Before
The Candy Men
Fanny
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Da Vinci Code