John Podhoretz

John Podhoretz on what makes a movie stand the test of time.

John Podhoretz on seeing the Coen brothers’ new western on screens large and small.

The Queen pic is a surprise hit—but, writes John Podhoretz, it is unsurprisingly unoriginal.

John Podhoretz on a down-and-out writer’s clever path to sham success.

John Podhoretz: The new Neil Armstrong biopic starring Ryan Gosling is a joyless schlep.

Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper shine in ‘A Star Is Born’—and Hollywood should make more melodramas.

John Podhoretz on the creaky, predictable return of the ’90s sitcom ‘Murphy Brown.’

The comedy-thriller is memorable despite its forgettable name.

John Podhoretz on retelling for a new generation the story of Eichmann’s capture and trial.

John Podhoretz on overlooking the identity-politics marketing to just enjoy the movie’s old-school fun.

John Podhoretz reviews the latest of Tom Cruise's 'Mission: Impossible' movies—an instant action-adventure classic.

John Podhoretz explains how The Rock's poorly chosen star vehicles risk squandering fans’ affections.

John Podhoretz on the forgettable fun of the long-awaited follow-up to Pixar’s ‘The Incredibles.’

All-woman crew boosts bling in latest ‘Ocean’s’ caper—reviewed by John Podhoretz.

Paul Schrader’s dreary latest film creates a noxious new cliché for our times.

The real reasons the latest Star Wars movie flopped.

We needed a review of the new Deadpool movie, and this is it.

Sequel to ‘The Karate Kid’ is a hit, may be good for some kicks.

Marvel’s funny, grand, tragic extravaganza.

Bumping an idol of French cinema off his pedestal.

Turmoil, generations, and starpower in the 1956 film classic.

New movie approaches the grisly story non-ideologically.

Why is Steven Spielberg devoting so much of his time to making cartoons? Ready Player One, his mammoth new movie, is the third film he's made since 2011 using motion-capture animation. The first two—The Adventures of Tintin and The BFG—were simultaneously hyperactive and dispirited. Spielberg is…

Why is Steven Spielberg devoting so much of his time to making cartoons? Ready Player One, his mammoth new movie, is the third film he's made since 2011 using motion-capture animation. The first two—The Adventures of Tintin and The BFG—were simultaneously hyperactive and dispirited. Spielberg is…

The Death of Stalin is a blacker-than-black comedy about the members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and how they jockey for power after the demise of Joseph Vissarionovich in 1953. The movie is sometimes gaspingly hilarious—and at all times audacious and…

Rejected by more than two dozen publishers in the early 1960s, A Wrinkle in Time was itself a work of its own time and entirely out of time—a sophisticated and original intellectual coming-of-age story featuring speculative science fiction, anti-Communist dystopia, and Christian hermeneutics. There…

Rejected by more than two dozen publishers in the early 1960s, A Wrinkle in Time was itself a work of its own time and entirely out of time—a sophisticated and original intellectual coming-of-age story featuring speculative science fiction, anti-Communist dystopia, and Christian hermeneutics. There…

It's rare—vanishingly rare—to get the feeling in a movie theater that the people who made the film you’re seeing know exactly what they’re doing, know exactly what they’re trying to achieve scene by scene, know exactly what plot they’re telling, know exactly the characters they’re putting on…

Black Panther is the least superhero-y of the Marvel superhero movies. T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman), its protagonist, gets some unearthly abilities from drinking the juice of a plant, but I can’t tell you what they are really, and the movie is delightfully uninterested in exploring them. What’s more…

Over the weekend Black Panther grossed an astonishing $218 million at the box office in spite of the fact—or perhaps because—it is the least superhero-y of the Marvel superhero movies. T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman), its protagonist, gets some unearthly abilities from drinking the juice of a plant,…

Who didn’t love Ron Howard’s Splash back in 1984? Tom Hanks falls in the ocean and nearly drowns but is rescued by the beautiful mermaid Daryl Hannah. She follows him to New York, and they have a romantic idyll until she’s captured by the authorities. “Nobody said love’s perfect,” says Tom’s…

The Post is about a little-known and relatively minor incident in the annals of newspapering—how the Washington Post made itself a player in the Pentagon Papers story, the biggest scoop of 1971, after it was beaten to the punch by the New York Times. And it merges that account with a female…

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is a “reboot,” whatever that means, of a 1995 Robin Williams movie about kids magically transported inside the world of a board game. Sony Studios knew that the new Jumanji was likely to be a hit from the reaction of preview audiences, but no one expected it would…

The most potent form of nostalgia is for a time you never knew in a place you do and imagine was at its peak before you came along. For me, that would be the 1950s in New York City, set to the cool, light strain of the Dave Brubeck Quartet playing Paul Desmond’s “Take Five.” I can never get enough…

Enough with the whiny movie critics complaining about the new Star Wars movie. Like them, I was fully prepared to hate the thing when I arrived at the screening, but that prejudice was overcome by the movie’s wondrous look and by its fascinating, multilayered plot.

Enough with the whiny movie critics complaining about the new Star Wars movie. Like them, I was fully prepared to hate the thing when I arrived at the screening, but that prejudice was overcome by the movie’s wondrous look and by its fascinating, multilayered plot.

The propulsively entertaining but problematic new movie I, Tonya reminds us that it’s been nearly a quarter-century since the figure skater Nancy Kerrigan was whacked on the back of the knee by a baton-wielding goon. The attack was the outcome of an insane white-trash conspiracy to give Kerrigan’s…

Darkest Hour is a movie about the first three weeks of Winston Churchill’s premiership in May 1940, and it is balderdash. In a razor-sharp National Review critique, Kyle Smith takes out after the movie for shrinking Churchill “down to a more manageable size” by portraying him as undergoing an…

Last summer, to prepare for the upcoming movie version, I reread Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. Christie was the bestselling writer of the 20th century and Murder on the Orient Express is one of her most famous works. But I found it almost agonizingly tedious. It reads more like…

If I tell you that Martin McDonagh is one of the most imaginative writers of our time, I expect you will immediately think he writes science fiction or fantasy—because the word “imaginative” has now devolved into a subset of the fantastic, the surreal, the unearthly. That is not the case with…

We are living through the golden age of the cinema of Sacramento. Oh, you didn’t know there was such a thing? There is. It’s new. Very new. In 2015, the Sacramento radio station NOW 100.5 could find only eight movies filmed in part in Sacramento over the previous 30 years, and in all of them it was…

Half a century ago, fashionable young moviemakers looking for new ways to separate themselves from old Hollywood fuddy-duddies—and to épater la bourgeoisie even though it was that very bourgeoisie they needed to become rich and powerful—sank their teeth into the notions that America and capitalism…

Can there be such a thing as a great movie that is also unsatisfying? It would seem like a contradiction in terms. After all, how can something work when it doesn’t work? And yet it does happen. The early Marx Brothers and Woody Allen pictures are disastrous pieces of storytelling, but who cares…

Can there be such a thing as a great movie that is also unsatisfying? It would seem like a contradiction in terms. After all, how can something work when it doesn’t work? And yet it does happen. The early Marx Brothers and Woody Allen pictures are disastrous pieces of storytelling, but who cares…

The 1973 tennis match between the 29-year-old female champ Billie Jean King and the 55-year-old former champ Bobby Riggs was many things. It was one of the great “pseudo-events” of all time, fitting perfectly Daniel Boorstin’s definition in his 1962 book The Image as “dramatic performances in which…

In Brad’s Status, a 47-year-old man takes his 17-year-old son on a tour of Boston’s colleges. A onetime journalist whose award-winning website went bust during the financial meltdown, Brad Sloan runs a nonprofit in Sacramento that seeks to match donors with other worthy nonprofits. His wife works…

Stephen King’s It was the bestselling book of 1986 and the source material for an enormously successful two-part miniseries on ABC in 1990 that has been shown regularly on cable TV ever since. The ridiculously overlong novel reads like King is parodying himself; the miniseries is obvious and…

Charlize Theron first appears onscreen in her mostly terrific new action thriller, Atomic Blonde, trying to heal her wounded body in an ice bath. She has bruises all over her back. Her face is swollen, one of her eyes blackened. She pulls herself out of the tub, dresses laboriously, and limps into…

There are few events in the history of war comparable to the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from the French beach at Dunkirk in the late spring of 1940. It is an episode that repays close attention to its every aspect—the terrifying Nazi triumphs in combat that led to it, the halting…

There are few events in the history of war comparable to the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from the French beach at Dunkirk in the late spring of 1940. It is an episode that repays close attention to its every aspect—the terrifying Nazi triumphs in combat that led to it, the halting…

The Big Sick is a movie about a struggling comedian from a Pakistani family and his graduate-student waif of a girlfriend. They break up. She gets a mysterious infection and is put in a medically induced coma. He must deal with her parents, who are angry with him for the way he treated her, and his…

The Big Sick is a movie about a struggling comedian from a Pakistani family and his graduate-student waif of a girlfriend. They break up. She gets a mysterious infection and is put in a medically induced coma. He must deal with her parents, who are angry with him for the way he treated her, and his…

In the past 15 years, no fewer than seven movies have featured the character of Peter Parker, the Queens teenager who obtains powers from a radioactive spider bite. Tobey Maguire starred in three of them from 2002 to 2007; Andrew Garfield starred in two from 2012 to 2014; and after appearing in a…

In the past 15 years, no fewer than seven movies have featured the character of Peter Parker, the Queens teenager who obtains powers from a radioactive spider bite. Tobey Maguire starred in three of them from 2002 to 2007; Andrew Garfield starred in two from 2012 to 2014; and after appearing in a…

Automobiles, pop songs, and movies form a golden braid as eternal as the one that binds Gödel, Escher, and Bach. In 1980, the writer-director Paul Schrader released American Gigolo, whose first three minutes mostly feature shots of Richard Gere driving a black Mercedes convertible along the Pacific…

Automobiles, pop songs, and movies form a golden braid as eternal as the one that binds Gödel, Escher, and Bach. In 1980, the writer-director Paul Schrader released American Gigolo, whose first three minutes mostly feature shots of Richard Gere driving a black Mercedes convertible along the Pacific…

So, The Mummy. The question that bedevils me as I begin this review is how I can get to the end of it. Like Lucy in Peanuts, I am now counting words to see how quickly I can get to 700, which fills my slot here at The Weekly Standard. That was 53 words. I'm 8 percent of the way there. Can I make it?

So, The Mummy. The question that bedevils me as I begin this review is how I can get to the end of it. Like Lucy in Peanuts, I am now counting words to see how quickly I can get to 700, which fills my slot here at The Weekly Standard. That was 53 words. I'm 8 percent of the way there. Can I make it?

Wonder Woman is a superhero movie about a very attractive person who was fashioned out of clay. She resides on an island on which only women live. It is in the Mediterranean Sea but hidden behind a gigantic magical cloud. She leaves it and emerges into World War I-era Europe so that she can get…

Wonder Woman is a superhero movie about a very attractive person who was fashioned out of clay. She resides on an island on which only women live. It is in the Mediterranean Sea but hidden behind a gigantic magical cloud. She leaves it and emerges into World War I-era Europe so that she can get…

The Arthurian legends are among the most enduring stories in history. But when a $175 million film version casting Arthur as the lowlife foster son of a prostitute battling dragons and a campy Jude Law bombed at the box office, the reason for the movie's failure, in Hollywood's eyes, was simple:…

David Lynch has not made a movie or a television show in a decade. But his overwhelming talent—a talent all but unmatched in cinematic history—for transferring to the screen the jarring and unforgettable images (and sounds) that haunt his unconscious has not been dimmed by his absence. The first 4…

David Lynch has not made a movie or a television show in a decade. But his overwhelming talent—a talent all but unmatched in cinematic history—for transferring to the screen the jarring and unforgettable images (and sounds) that haunt his unconscious has not been dimmed by his absence. The first 4…

This discussion of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 will feature spoilers, so I don't want to hear any whining from any of you nerds. Read on, or don't; I get paid either way. Anyway, if you do complain, you're being silly because (a) this movie isn't a mystery, and (b) there aren't really any big…

This discussion of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 will feature spoilers, so I don't want to hear any whining from any of you nerds. Read on, or don't; I get paid either way. Anyway, if you do complain, you're being silly because (a) this movie isn't a mystery, and (b) there aren't really any big…

I was recently reading The Whole Truth and Nothing But, a 1963 memoir by the legendary gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, and I came across an interesting passage in which the producer Samuel Goldwyn (né Szmuel Gelbfisz) tells Hopper flatly, "You can't have a Jew playing a Jew. It wouldn't work on the…

It’s nearly 24 hours since I saw the new movie Colossal, and I'm not sure what I think of it. I've never seen anything like it, and trust me, neither have you—so for that reason alone Colossal might be worth your time. The question I can't seem to answer yet is whether its originality makes…

Until its final scene, there isn't a moment in the new live-action version of Beauty and the Beast that wasn't done better in the 1991 animated film from which it derives.

Until its final scene, there isn’t a moment in the new live-action version of Beauty and the Beast that wasn't done better in the 1991 animated film from which it derives.

I was, and I remain, one of the few people on this earth willing to state for the record that I thought the 2005 Peter Jackson version of King Kong was terrific. Indeed, I've long been of the opinion that most people who have condemned that picture didn't actually see it. It's long and…

I was, and I remain, one of the few people on this earth willing to state for the record that I thought the 2005 Peter Jackson version of King Kong was terrific. Indeed, I’ve long been of the opinion that most people who have condemned that picture didn't actually see it. It's long and…

The title of the new horror film Get Out alludes to a brilliant Eddie Murphy stand-up bit that is never mentioned in the movie—but a routine the African-American comedian Jordan Peele, who wrote and directed the movie, surely knows by heart. "I was watching movies like Poltergeist and Amityville…

The title of the new horror film Get Out alludes to a brilliant Eddie Murphy stand-up bit that is never mentioned in the movie—but a routine the African-American comedian Jordan Peele, who wrote and directed the movie, surely knows by heart. "I was watching movies like Poltergeist and Amityville…

The superhero movie Logan doesn't look, sound, or behave like any other superhero movie ever made. It's set around El Paso and the Mexican border town of Juarez, then in Oklahoma, and finally in North Dakota. It's dusty and gritty and mostly rural, entirely unlike the nine world-capital-hopping…

The superhero movie Logan doesn’t look, sound, or behave like any other superhero movie ever made. It's set around El Paso and the Mexican border town of Juarez, then in Oklahoma, and finally in North Dakota. It's dusty and gritty and mostly rural, entirely unlike the nine world-capital-hopping…

Well, of course Moonlight won the Academy Award. Who’s kidding whom in the year following the dreadful scandal known as #OscarsSoWhite? Sure, it looked like La La Land had it sewn up, so much so that no one batted an eye when it was mistakenly awarded Best Picture for two minutes at the…

A wonderful movie is a small miracle. So many things have to go right, and they usually don't. What is needed? A good story, and good actors, and a competent cinematographer, and a talented editor, and decent dialogue, and a sensible producer, and a director capable of mixing all the elements…

A wonderful movie is a small miracle. So many things have to go right, and they usually don’t. What is needed? A good story, and good actors, and a competent cinematographer, and a talented editor, and decent dialogue, and a sensible producer, and a director capable of mixing all the elements…

Every now and then a movie comes out of nowhere to surprise you. It’s usually a small-scale piece of genre work whose own producers are likely so relieved just to have it done and get it released that they don't really know they might have something special on their hands. Last year's big surprise…

In my ongoing effort to perform the duties assigned to me as this magazine’s movie critic, I suffer for you. I see things you would not wish to see and tell you not to see them. Don't bother to thank me, even though you should. It's all part of the deal, the compact between us, forged over many…

Hidden Figures is a nice movie with a great subject that makes you feel good about America, reminds you how far we've come since the segregated and male-dominated days of the 1950s, and even reminds us that once we dreamed big about exploring the stars and going to the moon and all that kind of…

Hidden Figures is a nice movie with a great subject that makes you feel good about America, reminds you how far we've come since the segregated and male-dominated days of the 1950s, and even reminds us that once we dreamed big about exploring the stars and going to the moon and all that kind of…

There is a great American novel almost nobody has read: Theodore Dreiser's The Titan. It concerns a visionary man of business named Frank Cowperwood, and it's the story of how he helps turn Chicago into a major city by commandeering and then building its mass-transit system. Cowperwood is a…

There is a great American novel almost nobody has read: Theodore Dreiser’s The Titan. It concerns a visionary man of business named Frank Cowperwood, and it's the story of how he helps turn Chicago into a major city by commandeering and then building its mass-transit system. Cowperwood is a…

Seeing August Wilson’s play Fences on Broadway in 1987 was one of the highlights of my theatergoing life. This study of a 53-year-old garbageman named Troy Maxson—who struggles every moment to maintain his dignity and restrain the rage of a black man in 1950s Pittsburgh who was denied his chance to…

Seeing August Wilson’s play Fences on Broadway in 1987 was one of the highlights of my theatergoing life. This study of a 53-year-old garbageman named Troy Maxson—who struggles every moment to maintain his dignity and restrain the rage of a black man in 1950s Pittsburgh who was denied his chance to…

American TV has become the equivalent of India's Bollywood—an almost unimaginably prolific source of filmed entertainment. Bollywood produces more than a thousand movies a year, more than double Hollywood's output. Similarly, the networks and cable channels and streaming services have been…

American TV has become the equivalent of India’s Bollywood—an almost unimaginably prolific source of filmed entertainment. Bollywood produces more than a thousand movies a year, more than double Hollywood's output. Similarly, the networks and cable channels and streaming services have been…

How is the new Star Wars movie, Rogue One? How the hell should I know? Does it even matter what you or I think of it? Will any negative feelings we have prevent us and our children and our children’s children from seeing the next one, and the one after that, and the one after that—and on and on…

How is the new Star Wars movie, Rogue One? How the hell should I know? Does it even matter what you or I think of it? Will any negative feelings we have prevent us and our children and our children’s children from seeing the next one, and the one after that, and the one after that—and on and on…

La La Land should have been a disaster. Every American movie musical it resembles has been. The plot of La La Land recalls Martin Scorsese's tiresome New York, New York, released in 1977; both feature a principled and snobbish jazz musician who falls in love with an overeager novice performer. Its…

La La Land should have been a disaster. Every American movie musical it resembles has been. The plot of La La Land recalls Martin Scorsese's tiresome New York, New York, released in 1977; both feature a principled and snobbish jazz musician who falls in love with an overeager novice performer. Its…

In the great and overlooked 1991 comedy Soapdish, a television executive muses on the work of his network's greatest soap opera star. "She is and will always be the Queen of Misery," he says. Well, Celeste of Soapdish has nothing on Casey Affleck of the year's most highly-praised film, Manchester…

In the great and overlooked 1991 comedy Soapdish, a television executive muses on the work of his network’s greatest soap opera star. "She is and will always be the Queen of Misery," he says. Well, Celeste of Soapdish has nothing on Casey Affleck of the year's most highly-praised film, Manchester…

It's hard to make a bad Howard Hughes movie, but Warren Beatty has pulled it off with Rules Don't Apply, the first movie he's directed in 18 years and the first movie in which he's acted in 15. He is being treated kindly by the press for this calamity of a motion picture, for which there is no…

It’s hard to make a bad Howard Hughes movie, but Warren Beatty has pulled it off with Rules Don't Apply, the first movie he's directed in 18 years and the first movie in which he's acted in 15. He is being treated kindly by the press for this calamity of a motion picture, for which there is no…

Arrival is one of those movies that works very hard (and very cleverly) to convince you it's one thing until it takes an astounding turn in its last third and you realize you've been seeing a story about something else entirely—precisely at the point when it suddenly deepens, enriches itself, and…

Arrival is one of those movies that works very hard (and very cleverly) to convince you it’s one thing until it takes an astounding turn in its last third and you realize you've been seeing a story about something else entirely—precisely at the point when it suddenly deepens, enriches itself, and…

There’s something reassuring, even comforting, about competence—not genius, but rather the elusive combination of craftsmanship and care that can sometimes be more welcome than the unexpected. Competence is why Marvel Studios, which has been making superhero movies since 2008, has become the most…

Imagine for a moment that Arnold Schwarzenegger's agent received a script called The Accountant in 1992 because its producer and director hoped against hope he would star in it. In this film, Schwarzenegger would play an emotionless genius who cooks the books for evil governments and crime…

Imagine for a moment that Arnold Schwarzenegger’s agent received a script called The Accountant in 1992 because its producer and director hoped against hope he would star in it. In this film, Schwarzenegger would play an emotionless genius who cooks the books for evil governments and crime…

There was a recurring sketch on the late, great, still-underrated comedy show SCTV in which two farmers in overalls, Big Jim McBob and Billy Sol Hurok, reviewed obscure foreign films and highbrow fare with one common feature: They showed people and things exploding. "I'll tell you one film I really…

There was a recurring sketch on the late, great, still-underrated comedy show SCTV in which two farmers in overalls, Big Jim McBob and Billy Sol Hurok, reviewed obscure foreign films and highbrow fare with one common feature: They showed people and things exploding. “I'll tell you one film I really…

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children is the name of a children's book published a decade ago, heavily influenced by the Harry Potter series. My oldest daughter read it when she was 9, along with its sequels; she liked it, didn't love it, never really talked about it. She's now 12, and last…

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is the name of a children's book published a decade ago, heavily influenced by the Harry Potter series. My oldest daughter read it when she was 9, along with its sequels; she liked it, didn't love it, never really talked about it. She's now 12, and last…

I watched Blood Father—a tough, smart, violent little movie available on demand—on my iPad this past weekend. It works as a companion piece to Hell or High Water, the riveting bank-robber flick that many people think is the movie of the year so far, only instead of being set in hardscrabble Texas,…

I watched Blood Father—a tough, smart, violent little movie available on demand—on my iPad this past weekend. It works as a companion piece to Hell or High Water, the riveting bank-robber flick that many people think is the movie of the year so far, only instead of being set in hardscrabble Texas,…

Clint Eastwood's movie about Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, the pilot who landed his plane on the Hudson River in January 2009 and saved all 155 aboard, is the damnedest thing. You know what's going to happen before you go into the theater. Even worse, it's only a few minutes in when you get that…

Clint Eastwood’s movie about Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, the pilot who landed his plane on the Hudson River in January 2009 and saved all 155 aboard, is the damnedest thing. You know what's going to happen before you go into the theater. Even worse, it's only a few minutes in when you get that…

Fifty years ago, on September 8, 1966, Star Trek premiered on NBC. It struggled through 79 meh-rated episodes before it was cancelled. No one knew it would prove to be the most influential piece of American popular culture of the past half-century.

The death of Gene Wilder last week at 83 has led to the publication of many fond encomia to a performer who had ceased being of much interest 40 years ago, precisely at the moment when he became a movie star. It was the release of a romantic chase comedy called Silver Streak in 1976 that made…

The death of Gene Wilder last week at 83 has led to the publication of many fond encomia to a performer who had ceased being of much interest 40 years ago, precisely at the moment when he became a movie star. It was the release of a romantic chase comedy called Silver Streak in 1976 that made…

There’s a new bank-robber movie that's good enough to survive what may be the worst title in recent memory: Hell or High Water, a name that evokes precisely nothing about the picture even though it refers to a throwaway line spoken in its third act. At least, back in the day, when Hollywood came up…

The nifty suspense thriller Nerve captures lightning in a bottle as it tells a cautionary tale about the role of social media in the lives of America’s teenagers. And though it was made to appeal to teenagers, I think Nerve will have the greatest emotional resonance with the parents of teens and…

Fifty years ago, on September 8, 1966, Star Trek premiered on NBC. It struggled through 79 meh-rated episodes before it was cancelled. No one knew it would prove to be the most influential piece of American popular culture of the past half-century.

Central Intelligence, the only nonanimated and nongenre hit of the summer, is far from the worst movie I’ve ever seen. Among other things, it has a startlingly effective low-key performance by Kevin Hart, who for the first time in his film career doesn't spend two hours chomping on the scenery and…

A  chamber comedy set among New York City academics, Maggie's Plan is so slight on the surface and so seemingly unambitious that its remarkable qualities sneak up on you. The "plan" of the title only begins to emerge after the first hour—and it is part of the considerable achievement of the…

The last time America felt this bad about itself was the 1970s, and perhaps the only enduringly positive result of that time was how that rotten mood led to some genuinely great moviemaking. One could say the same today about television, and indeed the dark, anxious, impending-doom-like spirit of…

Whit Stillman’s peerless comedies of the 1990s—Metropolitan, Barcelona, The Last Days of Disco—feature Americans who are living in their time but are not really of their time. They are all young people, but they are not interested in the things young people were interested in when the movies were…

People love Captain America: Civil War, the latest Marvel comic-book movie. I mean, they love it. Say a word against it and their eyes narrow; by doing so, you have revealed to them your hatred of fun, and for this you must die. Well, maybe not die. Rather, they are sure you exist in a living death…

Sing Street is laden with melodramatic elements: a marriage disintegrating against the background of a national economic crisis, a vicious priest who beats up a boy, a wayward teenage girl with an institutionalized mother and a sexually abusive father, even a reckless emigration on a leaky…

One More Time, a small-scale drama set in the Hamptons now playing on demand in your living room, is a beautiful mess. The infectiously watchable Christopher Walken plays a 70-year-old singing star named Paul Lombard desperate to stage a comeback. A spectacular Amber Heard plays his 31-year-old…

How often can you say you’ve seen a movie that takes on a key moral and philosophical issue raised by the war on terror and does right by it? Maybe Zero Dark Thirty—although that initially garlanded and subsequently defamed picture, which does not kowtow to the screechy assurances of the…

Twenty years ago, in Dazed and Confused, the largely unknown writer-director Richard Linklater offered up an indelible portrait of America in the 1970s in the guise of a conventional R-rated teen movie. Now, in 2016, the garlanded Linklater has brought us a conventional R-rated teen movie in the…

In Batman v. Superman, the Caped Crusader and the Man of Steel try to kill each other. In the sequel, they should team up and kill the people who made Batman v. Superman. Its filmmakers and the executives who hired them run the gamut from the unspeakably cynical to the astoundingly pretentious…

‘It is well that war is so terrible," Robert E. Lee once said, "or we should grow too fond of it." The quote makes almost no sense to us today, after a century of battlefield horrors and the awareness of the psychic and spiritual costs of war on those who fight it. But for soldiers in the premodern…

I would like to report that, as a committed contrarian, I was less impressed by the theatrical sensation called Hamilton than everybody else has been. Alas, I can't. Hamilton, which I only saw this past week even though it opened over the summer, is everything you've heard—and if you haven't heard…

The stunning success of the giggly, extremely violent, and incredibly foul-mouthed comic book movie Deadpool—it earned $152 million in a single weekend when its studio expected half that—is nothing less than a pivot point in the history of popular culture. It marks the moment when the Hollywood…

There are jokes, there are inside jokes, and then there is the new movie from the brothers Joel and Ethan Coen, who are without question the most impressive and interesting American filmmakers of our time.

There’s a great joke about acting. One actor says to another actor, Hey, I just got cast in Hamlet. The other actor says, I know this is embarrassing, but I've never read or seen it. What's it about? The first one says, It's about this guy, Gravedigger #2 .  .  .

My friend the movie producer is a major fan of Mad Max: Fury Road. He says it’s the best film he thinks he's seen in five years. This is interesting, because it's not the kind of movie he makes; he produces "indies," meaning films with relatively modest budgets that center on character rather than…

The Revenant is beautifully photographed. Really. It’s beautiful. I mean, you've never seen such beauty. We're talking nature here, people. Rivers. Mountains. Snow. Even an avalanche. Some fog, both early morning and late afternoon. Also, it's supposed to be set in 1823, so the idea is we're seeing…

Two years ago, the writer-director Quentin Tarantino announced his next picture would be a Western called The Hateful Eight. He sent his script to a few people, and it was leaked. Tarantino announced that he would not be making The Hateful Eight after all because he was so furious. Then he reversed…

There’s no upside for me in reviewing Star Wars: The Force Awakens. If I say anything interesting about its plot, I'll be criticized for publishing spoilers. If I say anything critical, I'll be accused of raining on everybody's parade. If I praise it, I'll be attacked for excessive kindness and…

There is a video on the World Wrestling Entertainment's website called "Donald Trump's Greatest WWE Moments," which invites you to "Watch Donald Trump put his money where his mouth is in some of his most memorable WWE appearances." The video lasts for three minutes. In it, you can watch Trump slam…

Ryan Coogler, who conceived and directed the new hit film Creed, is up to something very tricky with this effort to update the Rocky films to the 21st century. Creed is not a Cinderella story about a working-class chump who gets an unexpected shot at glory, as the original Rocky was. Instead, it's…

Colm Tóibín did something interesting and unusual when he wrote his novel Brooklyn, which was published in 2009. He chose to tell an immigration story about an Irish girl just out of her teens who has no particular desire to go to America, no particular drive once she arrives in America, and no…

I went to see Spotlight out of a sense of dreary duty. The movie is being touted as an Oscar possibility and has received rapturous reviews, neither of which is any guarantee of quality or enjoyment. Quite the opposite, in fact: Last year’s Oscar winner, Birdman, was similarly praised; I found it…

You readers flatter me. You send me emails and letters asking me to review certain movies you’ve seen because you want to know what I have to say about them. At times these missives make me feel guilty, because I know I’m going to let you down. Because it’s often the case that you want to hear my…

Five years ago in these pages, I called The Social Network  “a two-hour exploration of a single question: Is Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook, an assh—?” Now Aaron Sorkin, the screenwriter of The Social Network, has just written a movie called Steve Jobs. It is a two-hour exploration of a…

When was the last time a movie was just, you know, lovable? Guardians of the Galaxy, maybe—all the more so because its lovability was so unexpected, coming as it did from the Marvel comic book movie factory. The same is true of The Martian, a movie so spectacularly winsome it’s almost beyond…

If you are a person of a certain age—by which I mean a person who receives unsolicited mailings from AARP—and you don’t mind old-fashioned dirty talk, you will likely find yourself utterly entranced by a wonderful new documentary called Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead. That’s especially true if you…

Black Mass is the latest cinematic portrayal of the life and career of James “Whitey” Bulger, the gangster who ran roughshod over Boston for nearly 20 years with the odd assistance of an F B I agent whose secret informant he was. Nine years ago, Martin Scorsese’s The Departed merged the plotline of…

Meryl Streep is so extraordinary she can do anything​—​anything, that is, except play an ordinary person. She’s only tried to do so twice in her 35-year career as a leading lady, and in both cases she was called upon to embody an unsatisfied suburban wife, first in 1984’s Falling in Love and almost…

Just as Philip Larkin sighed that the sexual revolution “came too late for me,” I had already aged out of rap as it emerged with enormous force in the 1980s. I was then in my twenties and, listening to it, I felt for the first time the same sort of generational disdain that adults of the 1950s had…

The Gift​—​a compact picture written and directed by the Australian actor Joel Edgerton​—​is the best American thriller in 20 years or more. On its own limited terms, The Gift is an almost perfect piece of work; in an extraordinarily controlled debut behind the camera, Edgerton doesn’t make a false…

Right now, in New York, the big news is the Broadway opening of a musical biography of Alexander Hamilton told in hip-hop. Such a deliberately anachronistic retelling of American history is automatic grounds for deep skepticism. And yet the chorus of raves for Hamilton—which extend from Barack…

Mission: Impossible–Rogue Nation makes no sense. Even more striking, this fifth installment in the Tom Cruise movie series based on the 1960s television show doesn’t even try to make sense. 

With Trainwreck, the comedy impresario Judd Apatow has once again made a movie about an irresponsible adult-child who is compelled to grow up by the end of the film. This was the plotline of both The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, the two box-office sensations that made Apatow’s career, and it…

Every now and then, on Twitter or Facebook, I find myself referring to something I really enjoyed as “genius” or “a work of genius” or “pure genius.” Why do I do this? After all, I don’t actually think Richard Benjamin’s performance as an unhinged Jewish Van Helsing in the 1979 Dracula parody Love…

The new Pixar film about an 11-year-old girl’s moment of crisis and change is called Inside Out, and it’s a perfect title—maybe too perfect for its own good. Everything the movie shows going on inside Riley’s head is glorious. And that’s most of what we see, so Inside Out deserves to be called the…

Jurassic World is a movie about itself. It tells a story about the difficulty of making special effects exciting when it seems like audiences have already seen it all. In the movie, the titular theme park has been built on the same island that hosted the old Jurassic Park back in the day when…

As a comic actress, Melissa McCarthy resembles a first-rate baseball pitcher—because, unlike many of her brethren, who have a singular shtick and stick with it, she has both a curve and a fastball. 

William Butler Yeats might have described an old person as a “paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick,” but then Yeats didn’t live to see the 72-year-old actress Blythe Danner bloom like a bird of paradise in the first starring role she’s had on screen in her 43-year career. I’ll See You in My…

One Friday evening in 1980, I journeyed to the far West Side of Chicago to a drive-in on Cicero Avenue and attended what may have been the strangest double feature in the history of the world. The top of the bill was The Gong Show Movie, a film written by, directed by, and starring Chuck Barris,…

Offering an opinion of Avengers: Age of Ultron is like reviewing Chex Mix. According to what stand-ard should one judge this mixture of breakfast cereal and pretzels and croutons and salt? Even if you find it bland or uninteresting you’ll probably have a few handfuls anyway. And if you love it, you…

There are several key shots in movies—the visual strategies directors and cinematographers and editors use to establish scene, mood, movement, and dramatic tension, guiding the viewer’s eye to important information. 

The writer-director Noah Baumbach has a gimlet satirical eye for the foibles and follies of the upper-middle class, which he deploys to brilliant and hilarious effect in his new movie, While We’re Young. A childless husband and wife in their 40s, played with beautiful understatement by Ben Stiller…

Run All Night is unquestionably the best of the seemingly endless series of thrillers Liam Neeson has made since 2008’s Taken made him a most unlikely action star at the age of 56. And yet, rather than being celebrated for rising above the others, Run All Night has been received so poorly by…

Fifty years ago, a wildly heated cultural battle broke out between two movie critics: a New Yorker named Andrew Sarris and a San Franciscan named Pauline Kael. Sarris was the chief American expositor of the “auteur theory,” which emerged from French film magazines in the 1950s and asserted that the…

Will anyone go to the movies 25 years from now? Will there even be movie theaters 25 years from now? These are not idle questions. New research from the Motion Picture Association of America shows how the moviegoing audience of those between the ages of 25 and 39 has contracted…

There should be movies like Focus every week. It’s a stylish and amusing film with glamorous actors, memorable supporting players, lush settings, and lots of twists and turns. Will Smith plays a successful con artist who chisels people all over the world. He’s amused when a two-bit newbie played by…

The question that haunted the American motion-picture industry in the two months leading up to the Academy Awards broadcast was this: Is Hollywood racist? In December, leaked emails revealed how one of  Hollywood’s longest-serving studio chiefs, Amy Pascal, and its most prestigious producer, Scott…

When I tell you that, in my opinion, the three novels now known as the Fifty Shades Trilogy are the worst books I have ever read all the way through, I am not telling you anything interesting. To criticize E. L. James’s publishing version of winning the Irish Sweepstakes is to attack a cultural…

When I tell you that, in my opinion, the three novels now known as the Fifty Shades Trilogy are the worst books I have ever read all the way through, I am not telling you anything interesting. To criticize E. L. James’s publishing version of winning the Irish Sweepstakes is to attack a cultural…

I don’t remember when I have been more deeply affected by a film than I was by The Last Five Years, a jewel box of a movie-musical that is unquestionably the best of its kind since Chicago was released in 2003. It is at once a tiny slip of a thing and an emotional blockbuster. Over the course of a…

The director of the new Russian movie Leviathan now lives in Canada. This was a wise decision on Andrey Zvyagintsev’s part—because even though Leviathan received grants from the Russian government and was officially selected to represent the country in this year’s Oscar race, at some point in the…

The overwhelming American Sniper is cast in shadow from start to finish by two real-world tragedies, one very broad and one very precise. The first is the irresolution of the Iraq war, the conflict to which the film’s titular character—Navy SEAL Christopher Kyle—was deployed four times. The second…

The Imitation Game is the fanciest ABC Afterschool Special ever made: It takes the inspiring, mystifying, and upsetting life story of a great genius and turns it into a didactic and banal lesson about how people who are “different” are also very, very special.

The marketing genius of movies like Selma, the highly praised docudrama about the march in Alabama that triggered the 1965 Voting Rights Act, is that they simultaneously confuse and intimidate critics and audiences by making them feel as though it would be an act of disrespect to speak anything but…

Who is the best young actress in the movies? The obvious answer is Jennifer Lawrence, all of 24 and with a deserved Oscar to her credit for Silver Linings Playbook and a second she should have won for her supporting role in American Hustle. (She’s also the most popular, with her third Hunger Games…

Raise your hand if you want to see Moses portrayed as an insurgent lunatic terrorist with a bad conscience, the pharaoh who sought the murder of all first-born Hebrew slaves as a nice and reasonable fellow, and God as a foul-tempered 11-year-old boy with an English accent.

This book is something of a Rube Goldberg machine. Its author, Time theater critic Richard Zoglin, makes enormous claims about the cultural importance of his subject: He calls Bob Hope “the entertainer of the century,” the first person to be a star in every medium, the man seen by more people in…

You want to like Interstellar. Why wouldn’t you? It’s a big, juicy, fancy, ambitious, emotional epic about the future of humankind. It has a killer lead performance by Matthew McConaughey. And for conservatives, the movie is full of surprising “Easter eggs” suggesting (as the blockbuster Batman…

The HBO miniseries Olive Kitteridge, featuring the Oscar-winning actress Frances McDormand delivering what may be one of the greatest performances ever recorded, is nothing short of a masterpiece. We have come to expect work at this level from HBO, but it’s still interesting to contemplate the…

If you go see the universally praised Birdman, the story of an over-the-hill film star trying to make a comeback by starring in a Broadway play, I hope you enjoy yourself. I really do. That’s what movies are for—to provide enjoyment, a few hours of diversion. Genuine art transcends that shallow…

In the universe according to Gone Girl, men are no great shakes: They’re inconstant and weak and foolish. But women .  .  . ah, women. They’re smart, resourceful, infinitely clever—and profoundly dangerous. It’s lucky for the financiers of this sizzling domestic melodrama on the model of Fatal…

In Whiplash, a dislikable teenager runs afoul of a dislikable adult, and what emerges from their conflict is the movie of the year so far. It’s rare for an American film to offer such an unvarnished portrait of unattractive people, and rightly so: Why would people want to watch? Well, the…

Right now at your local multiplex, Denzel Washington is appearing in The Equalizer, a lousy picture in which he is required to display almost supernatural killing skills—and he is entirely believable even though the movie is not, even for one second. You might say he’s playing Liam Neeson, or at…

For years, people have been telling me to read Jonathan Tropper’s This Is Where I Leave You (2009), a comic novel about a dysfunctional Westchester family whose secrets and lies and disappointments all come out during a week in which its members gather to mourn the passing of the patriarch.

There’s nothing quite so pointless as a movie about gloomy and depressed criminals. Why watch two hours about life on the other side of the law if there’s no kick to it? Crime movies are fun because they acknowledge the pleasures of transgression even as they show the wages of sin. So crooks on…

The summer of 2014 confirms it: Hollywood is dying. By “Hollywood,” I mean the industry that produces mainstream, conventional movies that are made and distributed by big studios. This summer was a great disappointment for the business, with total ticket sales down 15 percent from the year before:…

If you know that Boyhood has been rapturously received as a revolutionary work in the annals of American filmmaking, it is almost sure to disappoint you. I know this, because I saw it two weeks after it opened and it disappointed me, even though I knew I was seeing something no other filmmaker had…

The age of the male movie star has passed. Welcome to the age of the female movie star. 

I don’t know what it says about the movies these days that the best one I’ve seen so far this summer is a completely insane thriller set on a train in perpetual motion around a post-apocalyptic earth on which the have-nots are packed like sardines in the caboose while the wealthy live in splendor…

If you really want to know what a bunch of simians—whose IQs have been boosted by drugs to the human level (or higher, maybe even to the Kardashian level)—would do with themselves if that same drug wiped out all of humanity, then you really have to see Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. It’s quite an…

Something interesting happened a year ago: The movie theater a few blocks from my house was radically redesigned. This came as a surprise, for the AMC 84th Street wasn’t failing in any way. Indeed, from its opening in 1985 to the present day, it has been one of the most successful theaters in…

The key to understanding the publishing sensation called The Fault in Our Stars—John Green’s young-adult novel that has dominated bestseller lists for more than two years and has already sold more than nine million copies worldwide—is first to imagine Holden Caulfield in the 21st century. Then…

Movie stars go cold. It’s part of the way popular culture works. For a long time, people just love watching them. People can’t get enough of them. And then, after they go to the well once too often with a formula that has gone flat, or after their messy personal lives get all mixed up in the…

The much-maligned new comedy A Million Ways to Die in the West is actually pretty funny in spots. But it’s very strange. It’s an affectionate western homage, a mash-up western, a western pastiche. That’s not odd. What’s odd is that it’s an homage to a parody, and paying tribute to a spoof is just…

Is a single standout scene in a movie worth a half-billion dollars? That is the question to be answered by the worldwide gross of this seventh film in a series that began back in 2000. 

Why does it feel like a modest triumph that the new version of Godzilla is actually not bad? This is really the best thing to say about Godzilla—if said in a surprised, huh, who’da thunk it? kind of way: Hey, not bad! It’s an achievement of a kind when a film about a rubber-suited character…

The new movie Chef is about a hotshot cook who loses his way and then finds himself anew selling Cuban sandwiches off a truck. The food-cart-as-spiritual-salvation trope became a pop-culture cliché a couple years ago: Jason Segel did exactly the same thing with tacos in The Five-Year Engagement,…

Adultery comedies usually follow a pat formula: A perfectly sensible married person is being cheated on. Revenge is plotted, and the punishment usually involves taking advantage of the fact that the person with whom the spouse is cheating is either a gorgeous bimbo or a brainless hunk. The Other…

In 1962, Arthur C. Clarke famously observed that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” This observation is both brilliantly true and wildly overblown: After all, for many of us, even the most basic technologies, even those hundreds of years old, are still nearly…

There’s a new movie called Draft Day you’re almost certainly not going to see in a theater if you didn’t go see it during its first weekend—and because you didn’t, it won’t be around much longer. Twenty-five years ago, Draft Day might have been a hit. Its headline performer, Kevin Costner, was the…

Aficionados often refer to comic books in terms of eras: the Golden Age, the Silver Age, the Bronze Age. The same may now be true of the comic-book movie. Judging from last year’s mega-hit Iron Man 3, and the brand-new mega-hit Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the comic-book movie has entered…

First and foremost,Noah is a movie, and the first question about a movie is whether it is good or badas a movie. That turns out to be a difficult one to answer.

The Grand Budapest Hotel, the latest offering from the writer and director Wes Anderson, is a laborious confection, rather like one of the Mitteleuropa cakes made by one of its characters. It is elaborate and beautiful. It is sweet. It is a work of true artistry. But it is also heavy, and slightly…

It is almost unimaginable: five men past the age of 35 (one nearing 50), among the most successful and garlanded professionals in their field and at the height of their earning powers, leaving their jobs and their families to produce government propaganda. The experience was frustrating and often…

What does a poor or lower-middle-class white person, especially one from the South or Southwest, have to do to get a break from fancy high-end TV producers? It is a remarkable fact about this new Golden Age of television, which began with The Sopranos in 1999, that its primary focus of attention is…

The Monuments Men is a profoundly well-intentioned movie that seeks to pay deserved tribute to a subject both moving and dramatic: the effort by the Allies to protect the cultural patrimony of the West during World War II. But just as the road to hell is paved with good intentions, so, too, it…

Never before in history have liberal clichés about the evils and the rapacity of capitalism been combined so ironically as they are in The Lego Movie, a gargantuan triumph at the box office in its first weekend. This fast, flashy, colorful, and intermittently hilarious movie—from the…

Successful entertainers are often awful people. If you put fame, wealth, and narcissism in a blender, the resulting brew can be toxic. Fame causes ordinary folk to worship the entertainer and to view him as a superior being to be served. Wealth provides the means and the opportunity for indulgence.…

The year is 1961. 

The Wolf of Wall Street is three hours long, and you feel every minute of it. It’s not that it’s tedious; this filthy and foul-mouthed portrayal of young and crazy drug-addled securities crooks is far too garish and overheated to be boring. Instead, Martin Scorsese’s latest portrait of American…

This propulsive and overstuffed movie tries to do far too much. It has more plot than it knows what to do with, and for a while near the end it becomes almost impossible to follow. American Hustle is a partly fictionalized account of the headshaking Abscam scandal, in which six members of Congress…

Earlier this year, Cathleen Schine published a novel called Fin & Lady, a deliriously nostalgic look at an orphaned boy who comes to live with his wealthy sister in a half-renovated Greenwich Village townhouse. The time is the 1960s, and the whole cast of characters is present: the wise…

There’s a breathtaking and deeply frustrating Italian film called The Great Beauty I have to tell you about, because it’s really something to see even though it will probably drive you a little crazy.

The problem with 12 Years a Slave is that it is very, very good—and because it is very, very good, it is extraordinarily difficult to watch. So much so, in fact, that I assumed the movie was a more graphic version of the 1853 memoir of the same name by Solomon Northup, a free black man who, in…

How do you make a movie about depressing people that is not, in itself, depressing? That is the challenge that writer-director Alexander Payne sets for himself: He is the Houdini of depression, shackling himself in a narrative straitjacket of hopeless despair and then somehow magically getting…

There is only one person on screen. We hear him in a brief voiceover at the beginning of the movie, after which he speaks a total of 40 words during the 106-minute running time. What we do is watch this man as he copes with a disaster at sea. The movie is called All Is Lost, and it’s nothing short…

Thank God the baby boomers are long-lived, because without them, there’d be almost nothing worth seeing at the movies. Boomers may bankrupt the country with their retirements and suck their kids and grandkids dry with their Medicare Part D, but they remain a large cohort of moviegoers and they…

Cormac McCarthy’s script for The Counselor offers a new twist on the immortal George Orwell crack that some ideas are so stupid only an intellectual would believe them. Only a truly gifted writer could have written something quite as awful as this jaw-dropping fiasco, simultaneously so overwrought…

I saw Gravity several weeks ago, so it’s interesting to reflect on what kind of staying power this box office sensation actually has. Once you’re out of the theater and away from director Alfonso Cuarón’s mind-boggling success in convincing you that you’re actually watching astronauts struggling to…

Don Jon is a movie about Italian people living in New Jersey made by a person who has apparently never met an Italian person in real life, or ever been to New Jersey except perhaps on the way to and from the airfield in Teterboro, where private planes fly him and other celebrities from New York to…

I went to Enough Said, the new movie starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus and the late James Gandolfini, certain I would not write about it. Its producer, Anthony Bregman, is a friend of mine—so if I didn’t like it, I wouldn’t want to hurt his feelings by saying so, and if I reviewed it favorably, I would…

In 1941, a girl climbed off a train in Los Angeles. She was the daughter of a North Carolina farmer and a housekeeper, had grown up bitterly poor, and had few prospects in life. But her older sister had married a man who owned photo shops in New York City. He had taken a picture of the girl and put…

The box-office surprise of 2013 is a cheaply made, unbelievable, unfunny comedy-drama with a Mexican star-writer-director you’ve never heard of, who isn’t the least bit amusing, doesn’t act very well, and writes even more poorly. Imagine Adam Sandler’s Big Daddy crossed with Three Men and a Baby,…

It is said that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king—and when it comes to American movies, the land of the blind is the Sundance Film Festival. Every January, independent filmmakers looking for distributors fight to get their films shown at the festival in Utah. Followers of cinema…

The horrendously titled Short Term 12, a no-star independent film about a young woman working at a foster-care facility in Los Angeles, is receiving rapturous notices of a kind its young writer-director Destin Cretton could hardly have dreamt of. It has a 98 percent positive rating on Rotten…

Has there ever been a more melodramatic director than Lee Daniels? The man screams out movies at the top of his lungs. Even the titling of his films becomes an occasion for histrionics. In 2009, he made a movie called Push, only to discover there was a science-fiction film with the same name. So he…

Elysium is another ruined-planet movie, the third this year after Oblivion and After Earth. Such movies come in two forms: Either the Earth has gone wild and uncultivated so that it’s entirely covered in grass and trees, or it has become a giant and overpopulated garbage dump where the use of…

If you are a female performer desperately in want of an Oscar or an award from some critics’ circle somewhere, your best bet is to work for Woody Allen. Since Diane Keaton’s Annie Hall statuette in 1978, actresses in Allen movies have been nominated for 10 Academy Awards and have won 4 of them:…

The Way Way Back, a little movie about a 14-year-old boy who goes on an extended summer vacation with his divorced mother and her belittling boyfriend, comes close to being a classic. Close. Which poses a dilemma for a critic: I don’t know whether to concentrate on the marvelous qualities it…

By now, it no longer matters that the new version of The Lone Ranger is a remarkably entertaining, amusing, and exhilarating romp—not to mention eye-poppingly beautiful. In contrast to every other big-ticket film of the past five years, The Lone Ranger doesn’t exhaust you by the time the final…

So I saw World War Z, the new Brad Pitt movie about a worldwide zombie outbreak, and here’s the surprising thing: I can’t decide whether it’s the most anti-Semitic movie ever made, or the most Zionist movie ever made. 

Critics aren’t crazy about Man of Steel, the new Superman movie. It has a 56 percent favorable rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the site that aggregates reviews. But audiences love it; the Cinemascore poll gives Man of Steel a grade of A-. 

The “state of grace” is not, to put it mildly, a Jewish idea; in fact, save for Christ’s divinity, it may be the least Jewish concept in all of Christianity. So it is a fascinating irony that the first movie written and directed by an ultra-Orthodox Jewish filmmaker seems to embody the state of…

Not once, not twice, but three times in the course of the 86-minute running time of the extravagantly praised Frances Ha is the title character shown running through Manhattan. Once, we see her running with her best friend. Another time we see her running to find an ATM. Then we see her running…

The new film version of The Great Gatsby is, shockingly, terrific—opulent, powerful, and thrillingly gorgeous. Baz Luhrmann, the director and co-writer, plays it as high melodrama, operatic both in intensity and the lushness of its settings and costumes. This turns out to be the best possible…

Wildly successful movie directors often bemoan their successes and say they long for a time when they will be able to just make smaller and more personal films. Then they don’t. 

Wildly successful movie directors often bemoan their successes and say they long for a time when they will be able to just make smaller and more personal films. Then they don’t. 

The new movie about Jackie Robinson’s entry into major league baseball paints its characters with such an unmitigatedly saintly brush that Parson Weems himself might come back from the grave to say, “Speaking as the man who invented the story about George Washington chopping down the cherry tree,…

What does it mean to say a movie is an “epic”? An epic uses its characters and plot to illuminate a place, an era, an entire society. We are constantly being reminded, through camera work and art direction, that what we’re watching is something larger and more socially significant than its plot.…

Trance has to be judged one of the great disappointments in recent cinema, given that it is only the second movie Danny Boyle has made since Slumdog Millionaire. That Oscar-winning worldwide smash may have been the best film of the past decade. Not so Trance, which is very much like one of those…

The surprise of The Sapphires is how unpretentious and unportentous it is, considering that its plot hinges not only on racist Australian policy but also the Vietnam war. Based loosely on a true story, The Sapphires is about four aboriginal girls (ranging in age from 15 to mid-20s) who turn…

I've spent worse hours at the movies than the ones I spent watching Oz the Great and Powerful, which purports to tell the story of how the Wizard gained his dominion over the Emerald City. It has a great title sequence, there are a few good lines, and there’s an absolutely magical conceit involving…

As a general rule, movies about electoral politics are so awful we should all be glad there are so few of them. Elections are wildly dramatic events, but the drama unfolds over a long time. Thus, naturally impatient moviemakers insist on stuffing them with transparently absurd melodramatics or…

Someone living in Barack Obama’s America, circa 2013, says these words to you: “I’m so behind.” In previous epochs—say, the Age of Lewinsky, or of disco—this might mean any number of things. A person might have failed to collate the year’s receipts for his accountant. Another might not have…

Steven Soderbergh’s Side Effects is one of those rare movies that spends an hour seeming to be one thing until it pivots, about two-thirds of the way through, and becomes something entirely different.

The other weekend, a movie starring Sylvester Stallone called Bullet to the Head died at the box office. It made $4 million against a reported budget of $55 million. It was preceded in death by a picture starring Arnold Schwarzenegger called The Last Stand, which made about $6 million against a…

In 1962, Donald E. Westlake created his pulpiest character, the sociopathic criminal-of-all-trades named Parker, who became the protagonist of two dozen novels (written under the pseudonym “Richard Stark”) before Westlake’s death in 2008. In doing so, Westlake became part of an innovative movement…

Like Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino has now made an American slavery film to go with his Holocaust film (Inglourious Basterds, 2009)—and like Spielberg, he secured Best Picture nominations for both of his epic journeys into shameful human history. But while Spielberg treats his topics with…

Director Kathryn Bigelow, who won an Oscar for The Hurt Locker after a career of making worse-to-middling action pictures, is a visionary of the grubby. In that 2009 Iraq war movie, and in her new one about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, Zero Dark Thirty, sand and dirt and grime and mold and mildew…

Les Misérables grabs you by the lapels from the first moment and never lets you go. In this respect it is little different from the stage musical from which it derives—and not so different from the Victor Hugo novel from which the stage musical derives. How you respond to its unabashed histrionics…

Memoirs by performers are the cotton candy of autobiography—insubstantial, undemanding, and alluring, but when you’re done you can’t remember why you wasted the calories getting yourself nothing but sticky.

Almost everything about Lincoln is good—and, in many aspects, far better than good—save its most notable element. Steven Spielberg is the most successful, wealthiest, and most garlanded motion-picture director in the history of cinema, and he can make any film he wants. Only Spielberg could have…

It’s no wonder Danny Boyle’s spectacular opening show at the London Olympics featured a scene in which Daniel Craig’s James Bond jumped from an airplane along with Queen Elizabeth. For just as those ceremonies finally and for all time sealed Great Britain’s journey from the nation of the stiff…

The fizzy and exuberant cinematic confection called Pitch Perfect fits its title. This broad comedy about collegiate a cappella groups—made up of 8 or 10 kids who sing entirely without accompaniment and use their voices as their instruments—manages to be amusingly cartoonish and sweetly heartfelt…

When a movie receives rave reviews from critics who say they need to see it again to understand it fully, you should treat such a recommendation as though you were Will Robinson from the old 1960s TV show Lost in Space hearing his friendly robot companion as it flails its accordion-like arms and…

In New York City, at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre on West 49th Street, Broadway audiences are spending $1.6 million per week to attend The Book of Mormon, a no-star extravaganza advertised solely by the words “the new musical from the creators of South Park.” It is the most ecstatically praised and…

A new zombie movie called World War Z starring Brad Pitt and budgeted at $150 million won’t be coming to your local multiplex anytime soon, even though it was originally supposed to premiere this Christmas. Nor will the sequel to the G. I. Joe movie I’m sure you didn’t see, which cost $125 million…

Bootlegger movies have tended to be rather high-spirited affairs, with reckless and wild country boys outsmarting and outdriving the slow-witted lawmen in their counties as a mouth organ boings in the background and a Dobro is being a-picked. Moonshiners are among the original romanticized outlaws,…

Tom Mankiewicz, who died in 2010, was a Hollywood hack of limited abilities. He found his greatest success as a screenwriter of several second-rate James Bond pictures and as a director of the very weird big-screen comedy version of Dragnet. So it comes as a stunning surprise to discover that…

Tom Mankiewicz, who died in 2010, was a Hollywood hack of limited abilities. He found his greatest success as a screenwriter of several second-rate James Bond pictures and as a director of the very weird big-screen comedy version of Dragnet. So it comes as a stunning surprise to discover that…

Marriage is one of the great subjects—perhaps the great subject—of the novel. That is not true of the cinema. Movies end with marriages; they do not begin with them. Marriage is the ultimate fulfillment of the wishes and dreams of cinematic characters. It is not the ongoing condition of their…

The new comedy called The Campaign is supposed to be an up-to-the-minute satire of contemporary politics—a story about a mudslinging race for Congress in North Carolina between a blow-dried Democratic incumbent caught in a sex scandal and a wide-eyed naïf Republican recruited to challenge him by…

Christopher Nolan’s astounding third Batman feature, The Dark Knight Rises, represents the true maturation of the superhero movie—and provides the key to understanding the bottomless craving moviegoers have for these films, 34 years after the Christopher Reeve Superman gave birth to the genre. It’s…

The Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh, who has had the most interesting career of any hotshot American filmmaker over the past quarter-century, is tired, he says. Tired of making movies. He’s either going to retire or take a sabbatical. This is a very strange thing for Soderbergh to say. He…

For once, the buzz got it right.

It used to be relatively rare to hear a real-life story that proved the adage “truth is stranger than fiction” because there were so many details in scandalous true stories that couldn’t be shared in polite society. Now, of course, all we hear are true stories filled with scandalous details—ones…

Every year, there is a movie that becomes an unexpected hit because it finds an audience among people the Hollywood studios resolutely ignore: the over-50 crowd. Last year, Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris struck a chord loud enough among those who still dream of arrondisement-hopping with Gertrude…

It’s always a little discomfiting to hold a minority opinion of a universally admired cultural artifact. The very possibility of such discomfiture is part of the process whereby a cultural artifact becomes universally admired. A groundswell begins and people eager to be early adopters of the…

The Five-Year Engagement is the latest presentation from the orbit of Judd Apatow, the comedy mastermind whose particular genius is to stuff his movies to the gills with funny people doing funny things. This may seem like an obvious thing to do, but most movie stars don’t like being upstaged by…

Magic City, a lavish new series on the cable channel Starz, throws Mad Men, The Sopranos, and Boardwalk Empire into a blender. The resulting mish-mosh has all the attention to costumes and wallpaper and hairstyles you find on Mad Men, all the bad casting of Boardwalk Empire, and all the excessive…

No wonder that the movie version of the surpassingly strange young-adult novel The Hunger Games is an enormous hit and bids fair to become the most important cultural phenomenon of 2012. The thing is gripping as hell, with a profoundly intense central performance by Jennifer Lawrence that has the…

For a while, Friends with Kids is a breath of fresh air, a movie that offers a satirical look at fashionable New Yorkers as sharp in its depiction of low-level intimate conflict as a really good old New Yorker cartoon.

There were surely people at the first showing of The Godfather upon its release on March 15, 1972, who understood that the film they were seeing was the best motion picture made up to that time—and might have foreseen that this would be true to this very day.

Nicolle Wallace was the onetime consultant to CBS News and media aide to George W. Bush who was assigned to work with Sarah Palin after the Alaska governor was chosen as John McCain’s running mate. It was Wallace who assured the McCain campaign that her dear friend Katie Couric, a committed liberal…

Act of Valor, a movie with no major stars made for $12 million, shocked everyone in Hollywood by earning $24.5 million its first weekend. Why? Simple. It advertises itself as “starring active duty Navy SEALs,” and the commercials make it look like a full-length version of one of those action-packed…

Here is a tale of how Hollywood works now, and how the entertainment press covers Hollywood, and why none of it matters.

Thirty years ago next month, a movie featuring five cute unknown post-teen actors was dumped by its studio into a few theaters in Southern cities with the hope that audiences would be fooled into thinking it was a ribald sex comedy on the order of Porky’s. The trick didn’t work, and the modestly…

There are moments in Chronicle, a male version of the 1976 horror movie Carrie, that actually manage to evoke the wonder of cinema more surprisingly than any film since the awe-inducing moment in 1991’s Terminator 2 when the bad terminator reconstituted himself before our eyes as he rose from the…

Singin’ in the Rain, the best movie musical and perhaps the most sheerly exuberant film ever made, tells the story of a silent film star played by Gene Kelly whose career is upended by the arrival of talking pictures. The movie has one and only one serious scene, when Kelly realizes to his shame…

On one of the lousier days of my life, taken up with hospital visits and worrisome health news about dearly loved ones, I made my exhausted way to an undeniably stupid movie on a giant IMAX screen with sound booming forth from approximately 279,000 speakers on the floor and in the ceiling and in…

The word “slight” could have been invented to describe Young Adult, the new collaboration from the director and screenwriter of Juno, the beautiful teen-pregnancy movie from 2007—which has a far more involved and involving plot and many more characters. By contrast, Young Adult tells a tiny little…

The new version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy—John le Carré’s 1974 novel made into an indelible 1979 miniseries with Alec Guinness—isn’t really a piece of storytelling. It’s more of an art installation, a series of beautifully conceived and executed pictures designed to convey the mood of le…

The Descendants

How many rhapsodic adjectives can be summoned up to describe Hugo, Martin Scorsese’s new movie in 3D? Well, perfect comes to mind, which is saying something about a film that runs two hours and seven minutes. As I think back over it, there’s not a second that seems out of place, not a performance I…

There are important discoveries to be made when you see J. Edgar, Clint Eastwood’s new film about the progenitor of the FBI. I’m not referring to the movie’s wild speculations about Hoover’s supposed homosexuality, of which there is not a shred of proof—but the bald assertion of which allows…

The swoony romantic drama, once a staple of the cinema, is all but nonexistent now. These movies—the ones that immortalized the longing glance, the furtive sigh, the agonized sob—have been superseded by purported comedies with no jokes in them, films in which stunningly attractive and successful…

Take Shelter

The Ides of March is just about the last movie I expected to like.

The most striking thing about Patricia Bosworth’s new biography of Jane Fonda (Jane Fonda: The Private Life of a Public Woman, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 608 pp., $30), which took her a decade to write but is only slightly better than those straight-to-paperback junk books Fawcett Crest used to…

We are either in the third or fourth year of the great economic crisis, and Hollywood’s response has been, quite simply, to act as if there isn’t one. To date, there has been one movie—let me repeat that, one movie—that has made the effect of the crisis its central subject. And that film, The…

Drive

I haven’t seen The Help; I keep meaning to, but I also keep meaning to get my shoes shined and my receipts filed according to month, and I haven’t done those either. The Help strikes me, a male entering my sixth decade, as a movie to be seen more out of duty than out of desire, and I understand…

One of the biggest box-office hits of 1969 featured a 10-minute scene with a husband and wife getting ready for bed during which a hilarious argument slowly builds and then erupts about six minutes in. Such a patient and leisurely sequence would be unimaginable in a Hollywood movie today; it would…

Do movies matter? 

The Tree of Life

Larry Crowne

Super 8

X-Men: First Class

From roughly 1982 to 2007, the motion-picture industry was transformed financially by the advent of the VCR and the DVD—new technologies that created gigantic new markets for renting and owning Hollywood’s wares. Previously, Hollywood could only make its money on theater tickets and sales to…

  Bridesmaids Directed by Paul Feig

Win Win

Atlas Shrugged Directed by Paul Johansson

The death of Sidney Lumet April 9 is a striking reminder of how little the American motion-picture industry today has in common with Hollywood in the 1960s and 1970s—which were his heyday and, arguably, the heyday of the movies themselves. Lumet was unquestionably the most consistent and productive…

Source Code Directed by Duncan Jones

Limitless

A few years ago, on Turner Classic Movies, I came upon a 1952 MGM movie called Love Is Better Than Ever that was entirely unknown to me. It turned out to be a delightful romantic comedy about a fast-talking press agent whose head is turned by a young dancer. The press agent is always insulting the…

Battle: Los Angeles Directed by Jonathan Liebesman

The Adjustment Bureau

Drive Angry 3D

The Eagle

So I had a rare Saturday night to myself and decided at the last minute to go to the movies—and owing to scheduling, found myself with four possibilities. There was Rabbit Hole, for which Nicole Kidman has received an Oscar nomination. There was Blue Valentine, for which Michelle Williams was…

The King’s Speech is a winsome fantasy, as unreal in its way as Avatar. The science-fiction blockbuster succeeded in making an entirely animated world seem as though it actually existed. The King’s Speech, set in 1930s Britain and featuring famous personages, converts a stratified historical past…

True Grit

The Fighter

Black Swan

Tiny Furniture

If, to paraphrase Philip Larkin, the sexual revolution began in 1963, then the sexual revolution is now well into middle age. And wasn’t that supposed to be the point? Wasn’t the sexual revolution supposed to give us a rational and mature perspective on matters of sexual intimacy rather than…

Red

When Barack Obama gets called “dude” by a comedian with a fake-news cable program whose audience is a fraction of the size of Johnny Carson’s a quarter-century ago, you know we are deeply mired in an era in which American institutions, from the presidency to the late-night talk show, don’t wield…

The Social Network

Tony Curtis, who died last week at the age of 85, had one of the strangest careers in Hollywood history. He was, for years, an extremely pretty boy with not much discernible talent. And then, all of a sudden and for only two years, Curtis became a genuinely great film actor. And then, just as fast…

Last week, on Monday, I sat down to watch a new television show with a great deal of buzz behind it: Lone Star, on Fox. Reviews were rapturous; it was said to be vibrant, delicious, captivating. Then came a phone call I had to take, and I pressed the red button on my DVR so that the show would be…

The past week was an important one for HBO, the cable channel that singlehandedly transformed American television 15 years or so ago when its bosses saw an opening and decided to create programs that would surpass the quality of what was available on broadcast. 

Say it’s a Saturday night this fall, and your average movie-goer has a choice of staying home and trying to whittle away at the 18 episodes of Breaking Bad he has on his DVR but has never actually watched, or going out to the movies—which will cost him and his beloved at least $70 between tickets…

Farewell

A successful work of pop culture is usually the result of a happy series of accidents that bring together a bunch of disparate, often disharmonious, people who nonetheless manage collectively to produce something notable and enduring. Producing a good movie, or a good TV show, or a good mass-market…

Inception

Dinner for Schmucks

The Kids Are All Right

Solitary Man

Sex and the City 2

Iron Man 2

Not for several years has there been a reason even to spend a minute discussing new fiction programs on network television. CBS has turned over most of its time to forensic crime shows cast as sequels or spinoffs to its existing forensic crime shows. NBC was so incapable of following up its…

Me and Orson Welles

Up in the Air

Crazy Heart

Avatar

The Blind Side

The Princess and the Frog

Precious

We are being told these days that the wave of the future in moviemaking is the seamless merger of live action and animation. We've been seeing it in bits and pieces for a decade-the character of Gollum in the Lord of the Rings films was the actor Andy Serkis turned into an animated figure. The key…

This Is It

Where the Wild Things Are

An Education

A Serious Man

So Roman Polanski has landed himself in a Swiss jail. Expecting garlands from cineastes at the Zurich Film Festival, the celebrated director--whose working career spans nearly 50 years, from the Academy Award-nominated Knife in the Water (1962) to the Academy Award-winning The Pianist (2002) and a…

Bright Star

The year 2009 has been a financial disaster for nearly every industry save one: the motion-picture business. Hollywood's box office receipts are up nearly 20 percent from 2008. The eight most successful movies over the course of the year's first eight months have collectively grossed $2.7 billion,…

Inglourious Basterds

Funny People

It is axiomatic to many people that the movies, to take one medium, are more questionable today than ever; that they feature more sex and violence than ever before, and that the values they preach are not values at all, but narcissistic hedonism in disguise.

Public Enemies

Brüno

Year One

The Taking of Pelham 123

The Hangover

Up

Angels and Demons

In the past three years, three dozen film critics have been told by the struggling newspapers and alternative weeklies for which they work that their interpretations of the latest Hollywood and foreign fare are no longer part of the business plan in a business that no longer has much of a plan…

Star Trek

State of Play

West Side Story

Watchmen

"There aren't any big stars anymore," said the doyenne of the gossip business, Liz Smith, in a recent interview. "It's very diminished in quality, I guess is what I'd say, the quality of stardom. Because I don't know who most of those people are. I'm not kidding! I read Page Six mystified every…

The moviegoing story of 2009 so far is just how much more of it there has been than in recent years. Over the Presidents' Day weekend, the box office tally was nearly one-third higher than it had been in 2008, and that tracks with the year as a whole against previous years. This is a cultural…

Taken

Paul Blart: Mall Cop

Rachel Getting Married

Gran Torino

Revolutionary Road

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Doubt

Frost / Nixon

Milk

For a while, movie theaters were getting better. After decades in which the grand palaces were either allowed to run down into rot or torn down entirely, while new venues were slapped together in strip malls and configured in odd and distressing shapes, companies like Cineplex Odeon and National…

Slumdog Millionaire

George M. Cohan, the song-and-dance man, is invited to the Oval Office by Franklin D. Roosevelt. He is an old man, and thrilled beyond words to discover his president is a fan. FDR asks Cohan to tell him the story of his life, and thus begins Yankee Doodle Dandy, James Cagney's glorious 1942…

W.

Religulous

There is a moment in The Sting, the most popular movie Paul Newman ever made, when his character, the con man Henry Gondorff, wins a pot in a poker game. Gondorff is deliberately trying to get under the skin of his poker rival, a gangster named Lonergan, against whom he is running a complex scam.…

Righteous Kill

The most discussed box office story of the summer was the enormous success of The Dark Knight, the Batman movie that, we were told incessantly, has made more money than any film in history besides Titanic.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Tell No One

Man on Wire

Tropic Thunder

The Wackness

The Dark Knight

Mongol

When Did You Last See Your Father?

You Don't Mess with the Zohan

Sex and the City

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Iron Man

Speed Racer

Then She Found Me

Smart People

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day

No one wants to see Iraq war movies. The latest major Hollywood release about Iraq, Stop-Loss, cratered at the box office in its opening weekend, and flop sweat is already pouring by the bucketful from the editing bays where the remaining three Iraq pictures are being readied for release.…

Sputnik Mania

The Band's Visit

This year's excruciatingly boring Oscars stumbled to a conclusion with the victory of a movie that (a) nobody has seen and (b) nobody who has seen it is all that crazy about. The 80th annual Academy Awards ceremony was no country for ordinary men, or women, who go to the movies because they want to…

Pictures at a Revolution

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Starting Out in the Evening

Juno

There Will Be Blood

Charlie Wilson's War

Sweeney Todd

Atonement

The Kite Runner

No Country for Old Men

Beowulf

Lions for Lambs

Dan in Real Life

American Gangster

Lars and the Real Girl

Michael Clayton

The Heartbreak Kid

The Kingdom

Ira and Abby

The Brave One

The Nanny Diaries

High School Musical

Superbad

The Simpsons Movie

I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry

Transformers

Ratatouille

Sicko

The Yiddish Policemen's Union

Mr. Brooks

Once

Knocked Up

28 Weeks Later

The Valet

Spider-Man 3

Hot Fuzz

Disturbia

The Hoax

The Namesake

300

Zodiac

The Lives of Others

Breach

Factory Girl

Because I Said So

At the Academy Awards ceremony on February 25, Helen Mirren is all but certain to be named Best Actress for her portrayal of Queen Elizabeth II. Philip Seymour Hoffman, who was last year's Best Actor for his performance as Truman Capote, will present the award to her. Hoffman's successor this year…

Alpha Dog

Pan's Labyrinth

The Good Shepherd

Dreamgirls

The Holiday

The Good German

For Your Consideration

Volver

Bobby

Babel

Marie Antoinette

Borat: Cultural Learnings

Little Children

The Queen

The Departed

This Film Is Not Yet Rated

The Illusionist

Invincible

Little Miss Sunshine

Talladega Nights:

Scoop

Miami Vice

It's become accepted wisdom that the Era of the Blockbuster, which began with the release of Jaws in the summer of 1975 and has continued unabated to this day, has been a disaster for the mainstream American cinema. The possibility of producing monster hits that will, in turn, spawn monster sequels…

The Devil Wears Prada is beyond criticism. If you don't love every single minute of it, there's probably something wrong with you. There hasn't been a movie like this one in decades, a glossy spectacle about an eager young thing who comes to New York to make it in the Big City and emerges after a…

"WHEN A DIRECTOR DIES," the pioneering cinematographer John Grierson once said, "he becomes a cinematographer."

THE OMEN, the 30-year-old horror movie that has just been remade more faithfully than almost any other film in history, was both a landmark genre picture and a low point in American popular culture. Somber and brutally effective, The Omen gave Gregory Peck the role of his lifetime (yes, I am saying…

GARRISON KEILLOR'S DECADES-OLD radio show, "A Prairie Home Companion," is an extremely odd cultural artifact. It is a loving parody of something already long defunct when Keillor started his show 32 years ago in Minneapolis--a local rural variety program broadcast on the AM band. It's a compendium…

GARRISON KEILLOR'S DECADES-OLD radio show, "A Prairie Home Companion," is an extremely odd cultural artifact. It is a loving parody of something already long defunct when Keillor started his show 32 years ago in Minneapolis--a local rural variety program broadcast on the AM band. It's a compendium…

IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO save two-and-a-half hours of your life, read the next four paragraphs and you will be able to avoid the endlessly turgid film version of The Da Vinci Code while still being able to converse knowledgeably about it at outdoor barbecues and formal functions.

"HAVE YOU SEEN Keeping Up With the Steins?" asked my friend, a sophisticated and well-to-do New Yorker with high-toned literary tastes, of a new movie about a 13-year-old boy and his family preparing for his bar mitzvah in Los Angeles. "I loved it. I just loved it."

THERE'S A MOMENT LATE IN Mission: Impossible III in which Tom Cruise runs like hell down a crowded riverside street in Shanghai. Ethan Hunt, the secret agent played by Cruise, has located his missing wife and is trying to get to her before the villains decide to take her life. And Cruise isn't just…

OF THE THOUSANDS OF FILMS I've seen in my life, the one that had the greatest impact was, of all things, The Poseidon Adventure. I was 11 years old when I first saw it during its initial release in 1972, and it haunted me for years.

ON SEPTEMBER 18, 2001, ABC News president David Westin decided that his network would no longer air footage of the attacks on the World Trade Center only a week before. The constant repetition of the images of the planes crashing into the buildings had become "gratuitous," a spokesman said.

HERE ARE SOME THINGS THAT aren't very funny, though they might have been once upon a time: Jokes about how dumb President Bush is, and parodies of television shows that are already parodies of themselves. The blithering-idiot Bush hit its high-water mark with Will Ferrell squinting into the camera…

THE COLOSSAL FAILURE of the sequel to the mammoth 1992 hit Basic Instinct is primarily due to the new movie's colossal wretchedness. Jonathan Yardley once said of a book he disliked that it was "so bad that it adds whole new universes of meaning to 'bad.'" Basic Instinct 2 doesn't quite sink to…

A NEW THRILLER CALLED Inside Man is getting the best press of any movie so far this year, which at first seems almost as absurdly implausible as the film itself.

"I HAD THE GREATEST childhood I could ever want," the actor Andy Garcia said in 1999. "The only one I would change it for was to have grown up in Cuba. That would have been heaven on earth. But not Castro's Cuba. And hopefully it wouldn't have been Batista's Cuba, but a democratic Cuba. That would…

THINK OF V for Vendetta, the new movie written and produced by the brothers who made the Matrix pictures, as an Atlas Shrugged for leftist lunatics.

IF YOU GO TO THE cinema to acquaint yourself with interesting and novel methods of torture and humiliation, then have I got a movie for you--especially if, for an added bonus, you enjoy the thought that the person being tortured and humiliated is a law-enforcement officer employed by the government…

IT IS FITTING THAT a picaresque 18th-century masterpiece as defiantly singular as Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy should serve as the wellspring of a singular 21st century cinematic wonder called Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story.

IF ALL IT TOOK TO make a great comic movie was a great comic idea, the writer-director-actor Albert Brooks would be Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Frank Capra rolled into one. No one has ever come up with catchier and more enticing comic concepts than Brooks.

IN 1979, WOODY ALLEN made a movie called Manhattan in which a 43-year-old man has an affair with a 17-year-old high-schooler--a relationship that is welcomed and accepted by his friends. In 1986, Woody Allen made a movie called Hannah and Her Sisters in which a man has an affair with his wife's…

THERE ARE THREE QUALITIES ESSENTIAL for any successful romantic comedy. First, it has to be amusing. Not screamingly funny, necessarily, but lighthearted and diverting enough to hold one's attention. Second, there have to be a few eccentric secondary characters who will provide jolts of unexpected…

THE FIRST 15 MINUTES OF Wedding Crashers are about as good as American comedy gets. Washingtonians John Beckwith (Owen Wilson) and Jeremy Klein (Vince Vaughn) work as divorce mediators, and as the movie opens, we see them browbeat a husband and wife who would just as soon kill each other as settle…

CINDERELLA MAN is the sort of movie Hollywood gave up on long ago. It's a sentimental period piece about working-class folk who speak in dese-dem-dose accents--a mother who takes in sewing, a father who works down by the docks, and three kids who fear being sent away because there's not enough…

THE FINAL Star Wars is, as writer-director George Lucas promised, a tragedy--but it's not the tragedy Lucas thinks it is.

Kingdom of Heaven may be the single most anachronistic motion picture ever made. Director Ridley Scott and screenwriter William Monahan would have you believe that there was once a utopian moment when the city of Jerusalem was a multicultural and multiethnic paradise, run by wise men deeply…

THIRTY YEARS AGO, SYDNEY Pollack made Three Days of the Condor, a complicated thriller about a conspiracy inside the Central Intelligence Agency that unravels because of an unanticipated slip-up. An innocent CIA employee played by Robert Redford is out of the office--a Manhattan townhouse in which…

FEVER Pitch sets up a triangle between a 30-year-old Boston schoolteacher and his two loves--one a beautiful business consultant, the other a baseball team called the Red Sox. Lindsay Meeks, the business consultant, falls for the person Ben Wrightman is when the Sox aren't playing--a funny, kind,…

ASK ANY SOPHISTICATED NEW YORK theatergoer about the current condition of the Broadway musical, and he will turn Ancient Mariner as he begins a raving recitation of everything that has gone wrong. He will speak with disapproving horror of the greatest-hits shows--barely plotted affairs that string…

FOR AWHILE, a new movie called The Upside of Anger seems like a miracle. The film simply records the actions of the movie's fierce and fascinating heroine, a well-to-do mother of four girls ranging in age from 15 to 22, as she falls to pieces. Suddenly abandoned by her husband, Terry Wolfmeyer…

I AM NEW YORK CITY'S foremost Starbucksologist. I know which Starbucks in Manhattan have a rectangular shape and which are more curvilinear. I know which ones have their food displayed in horizontal cases with pastries at chest level and sandwiches down around your knees--and which have the…

AFTER SPENDING THREE MONTHS ON an investigation that must have rung up hundreds of thousands of dollars in billable hours, the team of lawyers hired by CBS to investigate its scandalously spurious report about George W. Bush's long-ago National Guard service finally concluded last week that CBS…

I NEVER FEARED strange noises in the night until a few months ago. But now I lie in bed in the dark, trying to sleep, and I can't, because of my dread. The room is silent, but that silence is notable because I am certain it will soon be shattered.

What if, some day or night, a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought…

AS NEW PARENTS, my wife and I want and need plenty of advice. From time immemorial, that advice came from elders--parents and grandparents and other wise souls who were presumed to know better because of their life experience. No longer. We parents of the new millennium know better than to look to…

"STARS WILL NOT play weak and they will not play blemished," William Goldman wrote in his seminal 1983 book, Adventures in the Screen Trade. "Try asking a major star to play a real Mafia head, a man who makes his living off whores and child pornography, heroin and blood; sorry folks, those parts go…

THERE'S NEVER BEEN a movie remotely like the old version of The Manchurian Candidate, the 1962 film starring Frank Sinatra. It was, by turns, a paranoid thriller, a dysfunctional family melodrama with more than a hint of incest, a horror film, and the blackest of black comedies.

HOLLYWOOD LOVES HOMOSEXUALITY without reservation--but within reason. Indeed, in movies and on television all portraits of male homosexuality are buffed to a sentimental glow, just so long as certain rules are followed. For example, it's fine for an obviously gay performer to play an openly gay…

DURING MY MONTHS as an expectant father, I declared I would do things differently from other writers once my baby was born. I would not exploit her existence for cheap copy. I would not objectify her by writing about her. I would not make use of fatherhood to score easy emotional points in articles.

MY WIFE is due to give birth any day now to our first child (thank you, and yes, we are registered) and I would like to take this occasion to make a request of all fathers: Please don't give me any more advice about the first year of the baby's life.

I Haven't Slept in my own bed for more than a month now. For two weeks, I spent all my nights in hotel rooms as I traveled the country hawking my new book. The rest of the time my wife and I have been residents of the guest room in my parents' home, because we are transitioning slowly and…

THE MOMENT when I first became conscious of the feeling of complete happiness relates to Christmas--which is weird, because I'm Jewish. I was 10 years old, and I was walking through Times Square on a cold December day in 1971. (I was an old-fashioned New York City kid, a kind that no longer…

I WRITE A NEWSPAPER COLUMN, to which I append my e-mail address. For the most part, it's a joy to get reader reaction, pro and con. The pro mail makes you feel wonderful and the con makes you feel like you've at least disturbed the comfortable thought processes of people who disagree with you.

Jerusalem

IT'S MIDNIGHT. I've just gotten home after 12 hours away from a computer, and before going to bed I trudge to the desktop to check my e-mail. As I watch, the little number in parentheses next to the word "Inbox" in my Outlook Express program begins to roll upwards like the point counter on a…

"DO WE EVER really get to govern?" asks the naive young U.S. senator of his more experienced chief of staff as they stand on the Washington Mall, staring across the Reflecting Pool at the Washington Monument.

"CHICAGO" IS THE BEST American movie in years--restoring a moribund genre, the movie musical, to its rightful place as the most thrilling of all cinematic forms and returning the dazzling, dark, adult edge of 1970s Hollywood to American cinema.

Child of My Heart by Alice McDermott Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 208 pp., $23 IT'S THE NIGHTMARE DILEMMA for every critic: There's an artist whose work the critic has recommended to friends with urgent passion. He feels pride as the artist's fame grows, because he can congratulate himself on having…

EVER SINCE MY CHILDHOOD, as a traveler on hundreds of flights, I have trudged past those happy souls in the first few rows of seats, ensconced in cushioned comfort, already sipping a drink and munching on some nuts. I've watched endless times as the attendants noisily closed the curtains, which…

Killing Monsters Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence by Gerard Jones Basic, 261 pp., $25 THE OTHER DAY, Joe--my fiancee's five-year-old nephew--decided to let me in on something. "Can I tell you a secret?" he asked. "My grandma bought me a special present." He paused.…

So I'm on a tennis court, trying to improve my game. The Catskill mountains tower over the clay surface, their inanimate majesty making a mockery of my all-too-human effort at athleticism. I've traveled 100 miles from my home in Brooklyn to a rather Spartan facility called Total Tennis for a…

IN 1972, a strange young Baltimorean with a pencil-thin moustache made a cheap film he intended to be "the most offensive movie ever made." "Pink Flamingos" starred an obese drag queen who is shown eating poodle droppings, and its explicit purpose was to take every clich about conventional American…

Hello. My name is John, and I'm a soap-opera addict. At this point, you're supposed to shout, "Hello, John," so that I will feel welcomed and safe while discussing my addiction. But I know that even in this culture of confession, there are some behaviors that go beyond the bounds of acceptable…

Stardust Melodies A Biography of Twelve of America's Most Popular Songs by Will Friedwald Pantheon, 432 pp., $27.50 THE AMERICAN POPULAR SONG was an amateur's game before the twentieth century. The only American artist to become well known exclusively as the author of lively and memorable secular…

THEY'RE OUT THERE every Sunday, rain or shine, killing time the Manhattan way. They travel as couples, and all four of each couple's eyes are haunted with confusion, downcast with disappointment, glittering with overstimulation. They're standing near the bathroom door at the corner Starbucks…

IN THE PAST DECADE, Broadway has been reintroduced to the work of an American dramatist whose worldwide fame never quite translated into proper respect. He was an innovator and a craftsman, and yet his name somehow became synonymous with hidebound and creaky traditions. The simplicity of his work…

MAKING THE 1957 film "Sweet Smell of Success" was an unhappy experience with parlous consequences for many of those involved. Its director, Alexander Mackendrick, was traumatized by his confrontations with its star and co-producer, the gargantuan Burt Lancaster--who threatened Mackendrick bodily…

TOM DASCHLE, Washington's most important Democrat, just can't catch a break. The Senate majority leader has been trying to figure out how to open up an effective partisan front against a wartime president for months now. Three times, Daschle has bravely taken on the president in a direct assault.…

ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER Ariel Sharon last week paid his fourth call on the Bush White House. The primary subject of Sharon's visit was the fate and future of Palestinian Authority boss Yasser Arafat. Arafat has been under virtual house arrest in the West Bank since December, a calculated act of…

"IT'S THE WORST PLACE on earth," a horrified young British woman says in the course of a new off-Broadway play set in Afghanistan. "Homebody/Kabul" is the work of the American playwright Tony Kushner, who staked a claim in the early 1990s to the mantle of Bertolt Brecht and George Bernard Shaw as a…

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS believed in ESP, so I'd like to think he may have caught a mystical glimpse of future CNN newsbabe Paula Zahn in his tea leaves when he wrote these wise and cynical words in 1933: "Only God, my dear, could love you for yourself alone and not your yellow hair." There was a big…

THESE SPOILED-ROTTEN KIDS today, with their stadium seating and Dolby Digital sound, not to mention the cappuccino at the concession stand and the ticket-takers who thank you for coming and the ushers who give you a nice mint as you leave. Will they ever know the sacrifices we older moviegoers once…

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 568 pp., $26 JONATHAN FRANZEN HAS THE SORT of ambition rare for an American novelist these days. His aim is to write great and enduring books that grapple with large social issues even as he offers minute dissections of the day-to-day…

IN THE SPACE OF FIVE DAYS, a man named Bill Maher, who hosts a late-night program called Politically Incorrect on the ABC network, underwent a kind of public nervous breakdown on national television. The spectacle had its voyeuristic fascinations, certainly. It’s not often you can watch a…

WHAT RUDY GIULIANI DID last week in the aftermath of the attack on New York was not all that different from what he has done in the midst of any crisis during his mayoralty. In each case—a terrible fire, a water-main break, the crash of TWA Flight 800, a neighborhood blackout—he dons the garb of an…

THIRTY-NINE-YEAR-OLD WALTER KIRN is an uncommon writer—the only American novelist of his generation who has also done serious work as a book critic. He has offered careful and nuanced criticism of such efforts at serious and ambitious fiction as David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and Russell…

RICHARD RUSSO is a writer who dares to repeat himself. His fifth novel, Empire Falls, is about a small town in the Northeastern United States that has seen better days. The only notable difference between the town of Empire Falls and the town of Mohawk (the setting of his first two novels, Mohawk…

THE DIRECTOR MICHAEL BAY had a dream one night as he considered how to film an epic movie about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In his dream, he followed a bomb, falling from a plane, as it descended ever more rapidly to crash into the deck of a ship. He awakened, gripped with an obsession to…

THE CITY. That,s what my neighbors and friends in Brooklyn call the borough of Manhattan. As in, "Are you going into the city tonight?" Or, "I had dinner with her in the city." Or, "My dentist is in the city, on 54th Street." Whenever I hear this, I cringe. I know they know full well that Brooklyn…

Since the publication in 1993 of Peter Kramer's Listening to Prozac, innumerable books have attempted to take the measure of a national psyche increasingly awash in mood-elevating pharmaceuticals. America seems to have embraced with unbridled enthusiasm the family of drugs that interrupt the…

Since it opened its doors in 1927, the ornate St. James Theater has been the premier venue for musicals on Broadway. Opening in 1943, Oklahoma! was performed 2,213 times on its boards, and seven years later Rodgers and Hammerstein presented The King and I there. Where's Charley? and The Pajama Game…

Since it opened its doors in 1927, the ornate St. James Theater has been the premier venue for musicals on Broadway. Opening in 1943, Oklahoma! was performed 2,213 times on its boards, and seven years later Rodgers and Hammerstein presented The King and I there. Where's Charley? and The Pajama Game…

AMERICAN HUMORISTS have never been especially adept at political satire, probably because their mass-media audience tends to be spectacularly ill-informed about politics. For satire to work, it must be precise, an immaculate and very specific recreation of reality that in initially subtle but…

I doubt that anybody has made better or more valuable use of the Internet than I have. In my time, I've bought a new car online at a few hundred dollars over cost, rounded out various obsessive collections through auctions, and researched hundreds upon hundreds of articles without moving from my…

GEORGE W. BUSH and his team have been expressing unflagging concern about the state of the American economy almost from the day the re-re-recounting was stopped in Florida. "We may be on the front edge of a recession here," Dick Cheney said in December. "A warning light is flashing on the dashboard…

Las Vegas

She's talking again. She's sitting behind me, a few seats to my left, and for the third time in the first few minutes of the Tom Hanks movie Cast Away, she's exchanging gossip with her companion at a normal conversational level.

A WEBSITE CALLED esoterism.com, which is dedicated to "bringing to everybody the understanding of Nostradamus's writings," currently features a "last-minute" bulletin. "Following Quatrain is a HOAX," the bulletin declares, "and is not from Nostradamus: 'Come the millennium, month 12, / In the home…

In the person of Florida secretary of state Katherine Harris, the Gore camp and its followers have merged the two key villains of the impeachment battle into one. For the purposes of Gore's postelection spin, Florida's top elections official has been made into an amalgam of Kenneth Starr and Linda…

The brilliant British actor Gary Oldman is not only a star of the new political thriller The Contender, but an executive producer. Oldman's manager, Douglas Urbanski, is another of the movie's producers. And they're both outraged by the finished product, which should give you an idea of the…

The movie Pay It Forward is a fable about an eleven-year-old boy who comes up with a plan to change the world for the better -- and it's a prime example of a moviegoing phenomenon that might be called "the wilt factor."

There was a culture war long before the last few decades -- only the combatants weren't liberal elites versus conservative regular Joes. This was a war between New York City and the rest of the United States. New York viewed itself as the only American locale of consequence, the singular place to…

I am now officially a hypocrite. I've probably been an unofficial hypocrite for many years -- who among us hasn't? -- but now my hypocrisy has become so blatant that I am uncomfortably aware of it, and feel the need to confess my transgression against the ideological purity I find wanting in other…

The horror parody Scary Movie has proved a staggering box-office success, grossing $ 42 million in its first weekend. That's more than twice what it cost to make, and this box-office bonanza makes it certain we are in for a dozen movies like it over the next two years -- which is to say,…

Nick Park is one of the greatest filmmakers in motion-picture history -- and chances are that, until this week, you'd never heard of him or his movies. Park has made five films. Four of them are short subjects -- the longest of which runs thirty minutes, the briefest a mere five. Three of those…

In the fall of 1975, Saturday Night Live premiered on NBC and instantly worked like a fibrillator on moribund American comedy. The show had a crazed energy made up of equal parts countercultural rage and sophomoric high spirits: full of itself, gleefully mean-spirited, and dripping with irony. It…

The Human Stain

THE UNIVERSAL OUTRAGE on the right over the raid on Lazaro Gonzalez's Miami house has reminded fratricidal conservatives of the glue that held them together before the collapse of the Soviet Union: anti-communism. The once close-knit strands of the conservative movement that have been threatening…

At some point in the past few years, a screenwriter named Stuart Blumberg went to a meeting with Hollywood bigwigs and delivered a pitch that went something like this: "See, there's this priest and this rabbi who want to bring religion to the people -- yeah, I know, boooring -- but see, they're…

New York

Of all those whom Bill Clinton has seduced and abandoned and then seduced and abandoned and then seduced and abandoned again -- always with the promise of another seduction -- the Hollywood elite has been almost as loyal as Monica was, and with about as much to show for it. Now Hollywood has taken…

New York

Walter Matthau, who turns eighty this year, has been appearing on screen for forty-five years. There's something shocking about that, for Matthau doesn't seem like a creature from Hollywood's past -- unlike, say, his contemporary Kirk Douglas. In part that's because Matthau didn't become a major…

Has there ever been an American subculture as benign as that shared by the fans of the 1960s television series Star Trek? Its members don't hurt anybody, they don't make a mess, and they pay their taxes. And yet for twenty-five years now, they have been the objects of merciless sport because they…

IT MAY NOT RIVAL Quemoy and Matsu or even Willie Horton in the annals of campaign sensations, but rarely has such an incomprehensible issue been raised during a presidential debate. Midway through last week's Republican set-to in New Hampshire, Gary Bauer turned to Alan Keyes and asked a…

There's a 73-year-old guy, born in East Harlem and named Salvatore Lombino, who writes under two different noms de plume. One of those names -- either Evan Hunter or Ed McBain -- is now his official name, only I can't remember which.

The world of the theater has ever been the source of great and wacky backstage stories, and one of the greatest and wackiest came about in 1937, when a twenty-two-year-old impresario named Orson Welles marched several thousand people waiting to see the premiere of a new musical twenty-one blocks…

In the forgotten 1979 film Natural Enemies, the narrator informs the audience, "My life stretched out before me like a bad movie" -- to which the critic Renata Adler responded, "It is precisely the sort of line no author should attempt." Frank Darabont, the writer and director of The Green Mile,…

Peanuts, A Golden Celebration

Peanuts, A Golden Celebration

New York

The most striking recent evidence that mystical and supernatural forces may be at play in America is this: The best movie of the year is a horror flick starring Bruce Willis as a psychiatrist.

One of the great showbiz adages came from the febrile mind of quipster playwright George S. Kaufman, who said, "Satire closes on Saturday night." Kaufman meant that it's almost impossible to please large audiences by making savage fun of the ideas and people they hold sacred. Kaufman wrote The…

Hollywood comedies have been undergoing a bizarre metamorphosis in the past few years: They are turning into horror films. You cannot watch them without, at some point, covering your eyes in anxiety and fear that the next image you see will upset, disgust, or terrify you. Right now, there are four…

New York

Movie critics don't like the new Star Wars movie -- or perhaps it's better to say that they were so sick of hearing about it, they heartily wished the picture ill from the moment it began. Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace has become a blight upon entertainment journalists' lives.

New York

The title, A Man in Full, is the first of many brilliant strokes in Tom Wolfe's rich, crazy, flawed, and deeply moving new novel. A Man in Full is, first and last, a meditation about manhood -- about what it means to live in a nation that worships boys and their games rather than men and their…

On a brilliant August morning on a waterway west of Seattle off Puget Sound, I find myself deep inside the USS Ohio, the oldest (18 years) of the nation's Trident submarines. The Ohio is armed with two dozen long-range nuclear missiles, each capable of killing millions of people. Together the 18…

Steven Spielberg wants you to know that War is Hell. In service of this profoundly original idea, which no one has had the courage or wisdom to express before, he has given birth to Saving Private Ryan. Using all the cinematic magic at his command -- which is almost unlimited, given that he is the…

You have to excuse America's movie critics for going a little overboard when a movie like The Truman Show opens. After all, they see many more films than anyone else, and when you spend your life foraging in a garbage dump, a cubic zirconium can look a lot like a diamond.

SUNDAY, MAY 24. I'm at an old movie house in Brooklyn, the kind that people used to call a "nabe" -- a neighborhood theater, far removed from the grand palaces downtown, where moviegoers went to see a double-feature with a cartoon and a newsreel for a quarter. But there are no double-features…

Warren Beatty's world extends from the hotel in Beverly Hills where he lived for thirty years all the way to the House in Beverly Hills where he now resides. The man who won an Oscar for directing Reds, the endless 1981 movie glorifying the Russian Revolution that would murder more than sixty…

Nick Hornby

From its first moment, Primary Colors lets you know that it considers itself a Very Important Film. There are no credits, just a gigantic American flag and a close-up of John Travolta's hand as it grasps another in portentous slow motion. This is almost exactly how the novel by "Anonymous" (okay,…

"Only on Yom Kippur does a shul get this crowded," someone murmured to me as the sanctuary at the Park Avenue Synagogue began to fill on Monday, March 9. It was a lousy, stormy morning; my childhood fantasy that raindrops were God's tears again seemed literally true.

SUNDAY, MARCH 1. Everybody always talks about how brilliant the Wait Disney Company is at marketing, how it can take a movie like Beauty and the Beast and turn it into a wildly successful stage show in New York -- complete with a pushcart out in front of the Palace Theater selling Disney…

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 14. How is it that moviegoers know, on the basis of almost no information, to stay away from a stinker? I've just been to see Sphere, which would seem ready-made to please. Its director, Barry Levinson, and its star, Dustin Hoffman, both won Oscars for Rain Man almost a decade…

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 28.

Sunday, January 11. The Film Forum is a Greenwich Village theater so solemn its lobby is painted black and its fare consists largely of documentaries. Going there seems less like an outing to the movies than a homework assignment, or maybe even a visit to the dentist. There's a hectoring tone even…

There's something sinful about the fact that you can now buy advance tickets for movies over the phone. It's not just the sin of profligacy (here in New York, it costs an extra $ 1.50 per ticket). It's the aristocratic mien you unconsciously assume when you waltz right by the mobs of people who are…

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 14. I got in to see Deconstructing Harry this afternoon, which may not sound like much to you, but given the fact it's opening weekend and I live in New York, that was an unexpected triumph. On Saturday night, I had walked over to the Village East theater at 7:15, only to find the…

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 23. Eighteen years after the original Alien comes a third sequel, this one called Alien: Resurrection. And what an eighteen years it's been. Back in 1979, Alien featured a special effect more graphic, horrifying, and disgusting than anything previously attempted: A tiny alien…

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 7. I am sitting in a movie theater in Reston, Virginia, watching on a screen twenty feet high the most famous person to emerge from the world of the highbrow New York intellectuals. It's true that Saul Bellow played himself in Woody Allen's Zelig, and he once got a phone call from…

Recently, on Tom Snyder's late-night talk show, the celebrated writer- director Quentin Tarantino went into a "these kids today" tirade about how illiterate most young would-be filmmakers are. They want to make movies, he said, but they don't know the first thing about, for example, the work of the…

He has a birth certificate from the land of Og, but he can't carry it around because the certificate is inscribed on a boulder. He grew up before the nation-state, but he grew up singing a national anthem that ran, in its entirety, "Let 'em all go to hell -- except Cave 76!" He has over 42,000…

In the mid-'80s, I had an idea for a book modeled on Only Yesterday, Frederick Lewis Allen's wonderful instant history of the 1920s. Allen's book was written during the Depression, and it firmly established the enduring image of the previous decade: its flappers, rum-runners, a nation driven to…

If you are, as I am, an inveterate consumer of pop culture, half the time you must wonder why on earth you bother. Most of the movies you see, television shows you watch, books you read, are disappointing. I can remember when that wasn't really the case for me, when even a bad television show held…

Come here, Sidney, and let me chastise you." So says a corrupt cop to Tony Curtis before he beats Curtis to a pulp in 1957's Sweet Smell of Success, a memorable movie full of purple chunks of dialogue that no actual person would ever speak -- certainly no thick-necked New York City policeman on the…

This year, the Tony award for best musical went to a show about a calamitous real-life event in which 1,500 people died by drowning in the North Atlantic. It won out over a musical about prostitutes and pornography in 1970s Times Square, another one about the weird Depression-era events called…

It is a truth, though one not universally acknowledged, that when people die, their eulogists praise them for qualities they did not possess and ignore those qualities they did have. Thus, a man known for a cruel and biting wit will be posthumously transformed into a paragon of kindness; a…

Marriage is the final event of innumerable movies and novels. The couple is pronounced man and wife, they kiss, and the closing credits roll, or the book runs out of words. Marriage is thus treated as a conclusion, an ending, an act of completion. And to be sure, it is. But it is also the beginning…

After Senate majority leader Trent Lott took the occasion of his appearance on ABC's This Week to issue one of the more pointed criticisms ever aimed at a president of the United States -- "He acts like a spoiled brat. He thinks he's got to have it his way or no way" -- Bill Clinton took remarkably…

It may be the 50th state, but come on! For those of us who grew up on the East Coast and never joined the Navy, Hawaii is more myth than reality. It's smack dab in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, for God's sake. How could Hawaii be a state when you've never seen a license plate with the word "…

SUNDAY, MAY 4. My friend Rick is eager to go with me to a movie he has already seen called Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. I am looking forward to Austin Powers -- a James Bond parody starring and written by the brilliant sketch comedian Mike Myers -- and I appreciate the gesture, but…

MOVIE DIARY

SATURDAY, MARCH 1. Howard Stern, whose success has been based on his unwillingness to stand for celebrity sanctimony, has now turned sanctimonious, and therefore he must be destroyed. I walk out of Private Parts, his autobiographical movie, in a state of bewilderment. It's a nice, unmemorable…

David Horowitz

THEATER

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 2. Of the dozen movies I have yet to see, I have ended up at Meet Wally Sparks, an astoundingly vulgar new comedy starring the 75- year-old Rodney Dangerfield. As I was buying my ticket, I felt a rush of fear at the thought that somebody I knew might be on line and would later…

MOVIE DIARY

Four years ago, just weeks before the baseball playoffs, it occurred to me that I had no idea which teams were playing. Football season had started as well, and I could not name the quarterback, the star running back, the star wide receiver, or the star linebacker of any of the four teams that…

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 22. I'm in New York City, which is the best place to be when you're a Jew during Christmas week. As American families gather, the entire country seems to shut down for a few days -- all except New York, where Jews constitute a larger percentage of the population than in any other…

War, as Clausewitz said, is the continuation of politics by other means, but what happens when you live in a country whose opposing factions no longer take up arms against each other? Law becomes the battlefield, and its weird nooks and crannies become the terrain where the battle is fought. And…

Hollywood loves "high-concept movies," films whose plots can be summarized in a single phrase, like "dinosaurs come back to life in an amusement park." So besotted is the motionpicture industry with the high-concept approach that many movies no longer even need plots at all, only titles -- Twister,…

In January 1903, a girl named Henya Woliner was born in the town of Nemirov in the Eastern European territory of Galicia. In December 1996, a woman named Helen Podhoretz died in a hospice in Manhattan. Henya Woliner traveled a long way to become Helen Podhoretz; she was an American for 76 of the 93…

I quit smoking almost exactly ten years ago, and let me tell you, I don't recommend it. Quitting, I mean. Smoking I do recommend, for reasons that have nothing to do with wanting to (a) look cool, (b) kill myself slowly, or (c) cause others around me to contract lung cancer secondhand. These are…

When the plays of Shakespeare are brought to the screen, directors usually take liberties with the text. They cut and rearrange scenes, set them in a place Shakespeare never intended and in a time centuries after his death. The movies are like variations; the language, the soaring poetry, the music…

In 1996, Republican party candidates took little or no credit for their legislative accomplishments, feared the label "extremism," began describing themselves as full of "common sense," and finally maintained their control of the House and Senate by going on the attack against their Democratic…

I finished Jeffrey Toobin's The Run of His Life last night, and it's a terrific book, and you don't know how hard it was for me to write those words: "a terrific book." Surely you've caught Toobin on one or another show this past month, talking about his account of the O. J. Simpson murder case;…

From the commercials, you might think the hit screen version of John Grisham's first novel, A Time to Kill, is about the trial of a black man who shot and killed the two rednecks who raped his ten-year-old daughter. Actually, it's about air conditioning. Or, more precisely, the lack of air…

Report that you are just going to, or have just been back from, Israel, and the response is invariably the same: "How are things there?" people ask, in the manner in which they might inquire about a relative whom they feel a little guilty for not visiting lately. How are things there? The question…

Independence Day, this year's box-office blockbuster, is not a science- fiction movie, even though aliens figure in the plot. It's not a special- effects extravaganza, even though the startling image of the White House blowing up made Independence Day a cultural phenomenon six months before its…

HOW COULD THEY? How could mid-level Clinton White House officials have decided to search through the confidential FBI files of Republicans? How could senior White House staffers have tried to force a criminal investigation of seven hapless sivil servants after their firing from the travel office?…

HOW COULD THEY? How could mid-level Clinton White House officials have decided to search through the confidential FBI files of Republicans? How could senior White House staffers have tried to force a criminal investigation of seven hapless sivil servants after their firing from the travel office?…

Last week, a 72-year-old man decisively took the reins of a party that has lately completed a little-noted but stunning transformation. In our time, the Left has monopolized youth, energy, and beauty -- or at least the world has thought so. That monopoly no longer exists. In fact, in the United…

The American theater generally, and the New York theater specifically, do not play much of a role in the cultural life of the nation. It was not ever thus. As recently as 30 years ago, Broadway was still a world unto itself, with its own stars, its own glamor, its own legends and tall tales, its…

Jane Eyre is an intelligent, judicious, and sober cinematic adaptation of an overripe, overrich, hysterical masterpiece. The movie is an honorable and respectable effort undone by its good taste and emotional reticence.

The Birdcage is about a drag queen who hardly ever dresses in drag, believes in family values, and never touches his live in lover of 20-plus years. These plot points are essential to the movie's commercial prospects; indeed, The Birdcage is going to make a lot of money because of its boundless…

What is the most despised profession in America? Judging from the amount of public scorn its practitioners receive, you might think the answer would be the law. And yet being a lawyer is still a position of high status in American society, a job that still gives a lawyer's parents some bragging…

The new movie version of Shakespeare's Richard III is remarkable for several reasons. The actor Ian McKellen and the director Richard Loncraine, who adapted it for the screen, have managed to distill a complex three-hour play into a successful, fast-moving film that isn't quite two hours long. It…

Last week on Friends, the NBC situation comedy that has launched a thousand magazine covers, the star-crossed friendship between the cute nebbish Ross (David Schwimmer) and the adorable Jewish-American princess Rachel ( Jennifer Aniston) finally erupted into romance after almost two seasons of…

What makes a movie a sentimental classic? It certainly doesn't have to be an artistic achievement, a work that advances the form. Think of some of the Hollywood perennials -- Casablanca, say, or Gone With the Wind. At their core, they are as preosterous as any romance novel, featuring tortuous…

REAGANITES, we called ourselves -- and though we came in many different guises and had many different obsessions, we shared one pre-dominant quality throughout the 1980s: We were proudly unyielding, immune to compromise. We considered ourselves at war -- against the Soviets on the march around the…

On the morning of November 13, Bill Clinton began the Budget War of 1995 . What he said was not important -- he was vetoing the first continuing resolut ion sent from Capitol Hill for his signature and offering some reasons why What was important was the stagecraft -- speaking to the nation from…

GoldenEye, the first James Bond movie in six years, is a terrific surprise -- not only because it's the first entertaining American movie in months but because it does not defang, bowdlerize, or sanitize its lead character. Quite the opposite, in fact; Golden-Eye is energized by its decision to…

Woody Allen, who turns 60 this year, is a relic. He may still look young; he may continue to attend basketball games with the adopted 24-year-old daughter of his one-time consort, Mia Farrow; he may still be howered with Oscar nominations, "as he was in February for his farce Bullets Over Broadway.…

In Edison, N.J., a man named Rick Sullivan has been producing a newsletter called the Gore Gazette for more than a decade. The Gazette is a typed and Xeroxed eight-page sheet devoted exclusively to ultraviolent movies -- the more repulsively, distressingly, sickeningly violent the better, in…

Twenty-five years ago, the Stephen Sondheim musical Company opened on Broadway, and made a sensation. Company has now returned to Broadway for the first time in a revival at the Roundabout Theater. But something interesting happened in the years between the two productions: Broadway died. And one…

Demi Moore has large breasts, and she loves to show them. Why shouldn't she? They're not really hers anyway, since they are less the handiwork of God than Dow Corning, Inc., makers of the silicone-gel packet. Besides which, Moore plainly says that her willingness to bare all -- or, at least, every…

My father now has a hobby. It involves stereo equipment, and I won't bore you with all the details because I don't understand them myself, except for the following points: 1) The stuff costs more than you could possibly imagine, and 2) The astonishing sound his so-called "rig" makes as the "St.…