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Inside the Restless Mind of Director James Mangold December 20, 2024
Say what you want about the merits of James Mangold’s super-hyped new Bob Dylan movie A Complete Unknown, just don’t call it a biopic.“It's a way of putting your movie down,” says the director and cowriter of the film, which stars Timothée Chalamet a...
The Anti-Woke King of Hollywood Lets Loose December 13, 2024
It’s not often that a TV show not only nails the zeitgeist but anticipates it—that zeitgeist being the election of Donald Trump and concomitant rebuke of the Democratic political-cultural agenda. Make that TV shows, plural, all from the ridiculously ...
The Life-Affirming Vitality of Raw Milk December 12, 2024
I've been drinking raw milk for almost 15 years, ever since I made a sudden switch from veganism while visiting my sister in Europe. At the time, she was living in Germany and getting raw milk from a local farmer. I remember mocking her, interrogatin...
A Feminist Director Takes On the Erotic Thriller December 10, 2024
The final day of shooting for “Babygirl,” a new erotic thriller, was devoted to a sequence that the film’s writer and director, Halina Reijn, had deliberately saved for last. In the movie, which will be released on Christmas, Nicole Kidman plays Romy...
'Hardly Working' Brews Up Millennial Malaise December 05, 2024
On the occasion I decide to spend $4.50 on a drip coffee from an artisanal shop, the barista serving me is usually a bubbly woman with a septum piercing and a tasteful forearm tattoo—or, if male, a pasty environmentalist with flabby arms. Obedient an...
‘Mary’: A Beautiful, Realistic Film about the Blessed Mother December 05, 2024
“You get it.”That’s the message I got a couple of months ago from D. J. Caruso, the acclaimed director of 2007’s Disturbia, and of the new Netflix film Mary. I had heard that Caruso was doing a movie about Mary, and sent him a piece I wrote earlier t...
Who Is Steve McQueen Trying to Be? December 03, 2024
At a recent preview screening in Toronto of Steve McQueen’s new movie, Blitz—a historical drama about a mother and son (played by Saoirse Ronan and Elliott Heffernan, respectively) who become separated during the German shelling of London in 1940—an ...
‘Nosferatu’ Review December 03, 2024
With the reverential early-horror tribute that is “Nosferatu,” Robert Eggers has crafted more than just a remake, but somehow less than a fully satisfying filmgoing experience. Visually striking as it is, with compositions that rival great Flemish pa...
When Stephen Sondheim Transformed Theater December 02, 2024
In the early 1980s, the librettist and director James Lapine asked the composer Stephen Sondheim what sort of musical he wanted to write. The pair were in the early stages of creating “Sunday in the Park With George,” their first collaboration of man...
What’s the Best Four-Film Run by a Director? September 27, 2024
However you shake it, the rollout for Francis Ford Coppola’s latest (final?) opus, Megalopolis, hasn’t gone as planned. Reviews are arriving with headlines like “What the hell did I just watch?”; crew members are lamenting the haphazard production; a...
The Unnecessary Doom of 'Megalopolis' September 23, 2024
Few directors have a more legendary filmography than Francis Ford Coppola, the mind behind The Godfather trilogy, The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now. But Megalopolis, hitting cinemas this weekend, is the most ambitious project of his career. For Co...
The Great American Malaise September 11, 2024
An observation. There are few interesting and new political ideas, and few innovative works of imaginative literature. Politics and literature are both on a decline; political and literary genius are increasingly rare. American politics and literatur...
Language and Leonard Michaels September 05, 2024
All that great writing, trapped in mediocre books! —Elif BatumanCatachresis leads to anthropophagy. —David Bentley HartOrdinary people have a right to feel harassed when their language is criticized. We have grammar school for that kind of thing afte...
The Tale of Two Tim Burtons September 05, 2024
“A small but significant relief.”“A return to joy.”These are just two of the early reviews greeting Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Tim Burton’s new sequel to the 1988 horror comedy that was his second feature film. After two decades of diminishing returns ...
What Is a Bradley Cooper Film? January 10, 2024
“I always knew that I wanted to direct something,” Bradley Cooper explains in a featurette for A Star Is Born. “And I always wanted to tell a love story because it just feels like something that everybody can relate to.” Since then, Cooper has direct...
The Secret Fuel That Makes “Ferrari” Such a Triumph January 09, 2024
Half of life is spent dealing with details: the numbers, the paperwork, the dozens of discussions upon which any shared activity, professional or private, is based. (The other half of life is dealing with the results.) Many filmmakers leave such prac...
'The Iron Claw' Doesn’t Quite Take Hold January 08, 2024
Given a long enough timeline, everybody of note winds up redeemed. So it goes with Texas’ star-crossed Von Erich family of wrestlers, which serves as the “inspiration” for director Sean Durkin’s The Iron Claw, a gorgeously-shot film that aims for epi...
"The Wisdom of Our Ancestors" by Graham James McAleer & Alexander S. Rosenthal-Pubul January 08, 2024
In The Wisdom of Our Ancestors, the authors mount a powerful defense of Western civilization, sketching a fresh vision of conservatism in the present age.In this book, Graham McAleer and Alexander Rosenthal-Pubul offer a renewed vision of conservatis...
Scenes From a Marriage January 08, 2024
Bradley Cooper is a talented actor, and with his film Maestro (2023)—now streaming on Netflix—he has expanded his oeuvre. Cooper directed, co-wrote, and starred in a film about the American conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein. Any biopic is a gr...
‘Night Swim’ Dives Into the Deep End January 08, 2024
In the opening sequence of It, the 2017 film adaptation of Stephen King’s terrifying novel of the same name, Bill Denbrough is helping his little brother, Georgie, create a paper sailboat on a stormy day. To finish the project, though, Bill needs Geo...
A Sense of Mystery and Wonder in a New “Color Purple” January 04, 2024
The prime success of the new movie version of “The Color Purple” is its tone: it plays like legend, filtered through the pleasure and the pain of the telling. It’s a musical, adapted from Alice Walker’s novel and from Marsha Norman’s book for the sta...
Bradley Cooper Is Trying So Hard January 02, 2024
In several respects, Leonard Bernstein was a man split in two. Dreaming of becoming the first great American conductor but finding more success as a composer for Broadway musicals, he also struggled with his sexuality, marrying a woman he loved but r...
