The promise of a new year is that we have another chance to start fresh and recommit ourselves to our long- and short-term goals. The new year also means that we may be blessed with pleasant surprises. We may find…
The history of Hollywood is studded with failed attempts to adapt European films. Take Édouard Molinaro’s charming 1978 French-Italian comedy La Cage aux Folles, about a gay male couple who masquerade as a straight couple to win the approval of…
“Oh, Christmas isn’t just a day, it’s a frame of mind,” Kris Kringle (Edmund Gwenn) tells the second-grader Susan Walker (Natalie Wood) in the perennial holiday classic Miracle on 34th Street (1947). Sometimes, we get too caught up in our…
Critic, schmitic. How can you pretend to be engaged in objective aesthetic appraisal when you’re talking about movies that you first watched decades ago in your childhood living room, while your late mother was trimming the tree and your long-dead…
I hadn’t heard of the 2018 film Operation Finale until the other night, when I was scrolling through the offerings on Netflix in search of something that might not be utter rubbish. After pondering a few other options, I decided…
After a decades-long dearth, theater audiences are suddenly spoiled for choice of whodunit mysteries. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery is the second whodunit written and directed by Rian Johnson, after his acclaimed 2019 Knives Out, with a third promised….
The original Hollywood adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s bestselling 1929 novel All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen nichts neues) hit America’s movie houses in April of 1930. Considering that the first talkie, The Jazz Singer — a semi-talkie, really, in…
With the disappointing election now behind us, I can forsake politics for the rest of the year and jump back into the even more disappointing arts culture beat. Not deeply enough to actually watch the dreck being shoveled on modern…
On an episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, the best sitcom of the 1970s, Ted Baxter (Ted Knight), the dumb-as-a-box-of-rocks Minneapolis news anchorman on whom Will Ferrell’s Anchorman character was obviously based, refuses to believe that overpopulation is a…
