In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure dome decree. Where Alph, the sacred river ran, Through caverns measureless to man Down to the sunless sea — Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan Watching cinema inexorably die, of internal wounds, may…
In an episode of the late, great sitcom The King of Queens, Doug Heffernan (Kevin James) and his wife, Carrie (Leah Remini), meet their friends Deacon and Kelly at a cineplex for a night at the movies only to discover…
Billy Wilder on Assignment: Dispatches from Weimar Berlin and Interwar Vienna Edited by Noah Isenberg; translated by Shelley Frisch (Princeton University Press, 224 pages, $19 paperback) How did Billy Wilder (1906-2002) become the Hollywood legend who created such film classics…
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…
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…
The most noxious thing about wokeness is not its inability to create great art, but its need to replace it with inferior work. Ayn Rand put it best. “Don’t set out to raze all shrines — you’ll frighten men. Enshrine…
I’ve always been of two minds about Quentin Tarantino. His movies parody and pay tribute to genres, both literary and cinematic, that have never really been my thing. Pulp Fiction (1994) was intended to be a celluloid take on the…
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…
When my mother first met him, she threw her arms around his neck and kissed him on the mouth. So far as I know, she was not in the habit of doing such things. But he was an exception. For…
What’s amusing about Bros — the new gay romantic comedy from the makers of blockbuster straight romantic comedies — is not that it bombed last opening weekend to become a historic disaster. It’s that the failure took Hollywoke and those…