Full disclosure before I start talking about Old Fashioned: I love supper clubs. I’ve visited a bunch of them in Wisconsin, and I love the old-school charm, the professionalism, the atmosphere, the consistency, the community and sociability of them. I bought the DVD as part of a planned excursion up to Arthur’s …
This year marks the 75th anniversary of the release of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. The Music Box is commemorating the year by showing a lot of classics from 1941, so we decided to take in a matinee. It’s almost impossible to say anything about Citizen Kane anymore. My partner, who’d never seen …
This weekend, the Gene Siskel Film Center, as part of the generally excellent programming at the Chicago European Union Film Festival, screened I Don’t Belong Anywhere: The Cinema of Chantal Akerman on a double bill with the Belgian director’s final film before her unexpected death last year, No Home Movie. Akerman was …
I like continuity. No, scratch that: I love continuity. I realize that’s unfashionable to say these days, when the artist is king (unless it means giving them control of their own work) and there’s a reboot of the entire Marvel or DC meta-history every other month; but continuity is what keeps …
Lately I’ve been thinking about the revivalists. That is, the wave of writers – whose God is Roy Thomas and whose Jesus is Grant Morrison (Neil Gaiman, I guess, would be the Holy Ghost) – who specialize in rescuing old characters from Marvel & DC’s equivalent of limbo and then …
There are lots of things to regret about the surging campaign of Republican front-runner/leaking colostomy bag Donald Trump: the way the American electoral process has become the sport of clowns; the fact that he’s so badly shaken the G.O.P. that people like John Podhoretz are starting to sound sensible by …
This is one of the most contentious election cycles in recent history. On the right, you have a Republican Party thrown into chaos because the most popular candidate is not just a racist, right-wing demagogue, but a racist, right-wing demagogue who is not yet under the control of the party …
Yesterday, we discussed the idea that, despite all their baying at the moon over the presence of the Great Usurper, Republicans are going to line up behind spoiled condiment receptacle Donald Trump if he manages to garner enough delegates for the G.O.P. nomination. (The frequently excellent Hamilton Nolan explains why in …
It is not, despite the angsty sweat-beads flying cartoonlike from the foreheads of a thousand keyboard town criers, a foregone conclusion that Donald J. Trump, a decayed yam in a gimme cap that has somehow amassed a real estate fortune and learned how to mumble the word ‘quality’, is going to …
HBO can afford disasters. Since they don’t run on a pure ratings model, but depend for their business on a sustainable production roster and critical goodwill, the fact that their new and star-studded series, Vinyl, is attracting far fewer eyeballs than shows that got canceled far more quickly doesn’t really matter that …
Although you wouldn’t know it from reading this blog, I don’t really pay that much attention to Stephen King anymore. He’s far past the stage where he’s ever going to write anything interesting again (I’d say he has been for at least 20 years), and even when he does something …
It’s a truism I’ve repeated in my critical writings more times than I can count: you have to review the movie you’re watching, not the movie you wish you were watching. Any sharp critic with a creative streak and a broad foundation can easily imagine how a movie, particularly one …
As often as the Coen Brothers are referred to as pastiche artists, their films tend to be pretty thematically consistent, with the genre-bending taking place more on the level of the filmmaking than the narrative. Their newest movie, Hail! Caesar, gives them a chance to exercise it in truth, with its …
Quentin Tarantino has always been a polarizing figure. To his defenders, he is a visionary, a revolutionary, a provocateur, a brilliant technician who makes explosively exciting films drawn from an encyclopedic knowledge of cinema history and who challenges both our expectations and our stereotypes; to his critics, he is a …
I take Rosa Luxemburg very seriously. Since feminism and class consciousness have been two of my passions my entire adult life, it’s easy to see why I’m drawn to women who vocally espoused both, and Rosa Luxemburg is perhaps the greatest of them all. I’ve read her writings, studied her …
