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…

Move over Jimmy Stewart and Bing Crosby. America is well used to the annual appearance of what have become Christmas classics over the decades. Whether it’s Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) or Bing Crosby’s White Christmas (1954) or little Ralphie (Peter…

Another year, another installment of The Crown. The series, which started in 2016, has been a cash cow for Netflix. But the end is in sight. The first four episodes of the sixth season went out to the world on…

Like most great directors now either dead or slowing down, the late Peter Bogdanovich was a devotee of classic films. His 1973 book, Pieces of Time, features incisive essays on cinema and interviews with screen legends James Stewart, Howard Hawks,…

David Fincher’s latest feature, The Killer, debuted on Netflix Friday night. The film is a meticulously crafted thriller that showcases both Fincher’s visionary eye and star Michael Fassbender’s magnetic subtlety. The Killer follows an unnamed professional assassin who, after a…

Once upon a time, when Disney knew what it was doing, it followed its founder’s formula for success. “I do not make films primarily for children,” Walt Disney said. “I make them for the child in all of us, whether…

In my sordid past, I was a Hollywood-based screenwriter. This was from the mid-90s to the mid-00s when people bought or rented movies rather than stream videos on their cellphones. Although I wrote good “A” scripts that didn’t sell, I…

The once popular conservative radio host, Michael Savage, coined the phrase, “Liberalism is a mental disorder,” and wrote a 2005 book with that title. In the two decades since, Savage has been proven not only right but prescient. Ironically, the…