Author Archive
October 25, 2024Note: The following essay contains spoilers. On 22 December 1984, four teenagers, all of whom had previously been arrested, boarded a New York subway train with the intention of...
September 3, 2024It’s hard for a novelist to make a double axe-murderer sympathetic, especially when his victims are an old woman and her mentally disabled half-sister. In addition to which,...
June 6, 2024The Mad Max franchise is one of the more improbable successes in Hollywood history. It began in 1979 as an original, one-off, low-budget exploitation flick written,...
April 19, 2024In Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 classic Apocalypse Now, a US patrol boat heads upriver during the Vietnam War to assassinate Colonel Kurtz, a rogue commander whose...
February 19, 2024The Oscars have never been about art. As Louis B. Mayer once remarked, recalling the creation of his brainchild, “I found that the best way to handle [moviemakers] was to...
