“I only know celebrities,” Elaine Dundy, the first wife of Kenneth Tynan, once said. “I don’t know any people.” The same could be said of the characters in Sofia Coppola’s movie, The Bling Ring, based on an article in Vanity…
Like 14-year-old Duncan (Liam James) in the rear-facing third bench seat of his would-be stepfather’s pre-minivan era Buick station wagon, The Way, Way Back by Nat Faxon and Jim Rash is backward-looking. Though ostensibly set in the present day, it…
Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing makes me feel like giving up. I still believe, believe it or not, that reading or listening to or watching Shakespeare should be an opportunity for us imaginatively to put ourselves back into the…
According to The Times of London, the girls of Britain’s Girl Guides movement, the equivalent of our Girl Scouts, fearing that their “Promise” might be putting atheists and determined non-patriots off joining, are to abandon their pledge to serve God…
When it was announced recently that Kate Winslet was pregnant by her new husband, Ned Rocknroll [sic], a columnist for the London Daily Telegraph wrote a piece suggesting that — how to put this delicately? — she should be ashamed to…
Although I enjoyed the first season of Mad Men, which aired in 2007, I got a bit bored with it thereafter. It seemed to me to have degenerated into mere soap opera. This was also true of The Sopranos, which…
Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s film version of Henry James’s novel What Maisie Knew (the screenplay adapted by Nancy Doyne and Carroll Cartwright) is worth seeing if only for the best performance by a child actor, in my view, since…
The title of Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha is an allusion to something at the very end of the film, a visual suggestion that part of the heroine has been amputated during the course of what we have seen during the…
Susanne Bier’s Love is All You Need is a disappointment. This is not because the title (the Danish title translates as The Bald Hairdresser, but that was thought a turn-off for the American market) promises the Beatles and delivers Dean…