As the Christmas and Hanukkah season rolls toward this evening’s midnight crescendo, Hollywood’s year-end prestige movies beckon. Here are my thoughts on three films that I caught while visiting my family and friends in southern California. The Color Purple: Green…

For decades during the postwar era, Leonard Bernstein occupied a unique place at the red-hot center of both America’s high and middlebrow culture. While serving as music director of the New York Philharmonic, he conducted major orchestras around the world…

I didn’t watch too many Hallmark Channel or Great American Family Christmas movies this season for two reasons. One, I’m single again after breaking up with my longtime girlfriend (as mentioned in my tragic piece here) so I have a…

Asked in an interview recently to name my favorite Christmas movie, I went through the usual routine of naming several candidates — new and old, mostly black and white — before inevitably getting to the point, the undeniable, the obvious:…

Last month, reporting here on the first part of the sixth and last season of The Crown, I was, if I say so myself, a mite snotty. I more or less accused the series’ creator, Peter Morgan, of shamelessly squeezing…

Twenty years after the biblical drama The Passion of the Christ smashed records by grossing more than $611 million worldwide its long-awaited sequel The Passion of the Christ: Resurrection is under production this Christmas season.  But 2024 will be the…

Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever By Matt Singer (G.P. Putman’s Sons, 352 pages, $30) In the late 1960s, Gene Siskel was a young reporter at the Chicago Tribune and Roger Ebert a young reporter at the…

Both of my grandfathers are dead. Both died abruptly.  My father’s father passed away from a stroke when I was just 13. My father and I watched it happen. Or, rather, I watched my father watch it happen. The grave…

About a year ago, my younger brother — a top Second Unit Director in major productions (Killers of the Flower Moon, The Joker, The Irishman, a hundred more) and a former college basketball star — asked me to develop what…

I’ve never entirely understood why, when the subject is death-dealing psychopathic dictators like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, Napoleon almost always gets a pass. No, he didn’t put Jews into concentration camps — in fact, one of his few genuine reforms…