All about me.
Netflix’s new sci-fi thriller Stranger Things is one of those shows that it’s almost impossible to talk about for all the wrong reasons. A critical and popular success, any chance of talking about it on its actual merits has already been buried under an avalanche of thinkpieces, listicles, clickbait articles, and animated …
I won’t be watching the Democratic National Convention this week. I don’t care for pomp in a time of hardship; I’m not interested in seeing elites congratulate themselves on their moral rectitude; and most of all, I watched enough of the dismal Republican get-together and there’s only so much shit …
There is no such thing as purity in cinema, and even the expressions we find most effective and audacious are compromised in a million little ways before we ever come close to seeing them. One change, in the casting or in budget or even in the weather, and the movie …
Better Call Saul might have seemed like it was born with the television equivalent of a silver spoon in its mouth. Afforded every advantage by the AMC network, and bringing with it a built-in audience from Breaking Bad, one of the most successful and acclaimed cable dramas of all time, it …
It says something — something I am dead certain is not good — about our culture that the preeminent political statement of the moment is where you stand on the Ghostbusters remake. As I write this, Paul Feig’s all-female reboot of the beloved franchise has only just had its wide opening, and …
My friend Tom Block is in serious trouble and needs our help. Let me tell you about Tom. He’s smart , funny , a great storyteller , a terrific writer , and a critic of unusual insight . He’s lived a life many of us would love to lead. Most recently he took …
It takes a lot of nerve for anyone, let alone a Czech, to title a story “Mr. Kafka”. Finicky Franz casts such a huge shadow on the literature of Prague that it’s audacious to the point of foolhardiness to invite the comparison. But if anyone earned the right to do …
It is not often that the events of a single day so crashingly drives home the lessons of a social moment. America had barely raised its head from the pillow after learning of the death in Louisiana of Alton Sterling, a black man hustling bootlegs outside of a convenience store, …
Yorgos Lanthimos does something that is almost unprecedented in film today: he makes movies that are entirely original. Say what you will about his work — that it is ridiculous, that it is pretentious, that it is incomprehensible, that it is impenetrable, that it is cynical, that it lacks humanity …
Today is the Fourth of July, America’s national holiday. Longtime readers of this site will know that every day on this year, I post a little sermon about the state of the country, always trying to follow the advice of the late, great Paul Fussell, who wrote, in BAD, or, the …
When I finally got around to reading Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, I experienced the kind of revolutionary bolt from the blue that changes minds and changes worlds. I’d read Rorty before (a few short essays here and there, and his Objectivity, Truth and Relativism), and liked what I’d seen, …
I don’t usually like going to public appearances by artists. I don’t normally like readings; I don’t normally like director screenings; and I don’t normally like writer Q&As. You’d think that I would; I used to be in the celebrity interview game, after all, and there’s nothing like talking directly …
Peter Greenaway has had such a willy-nilly career over the last few decades that it’s easy to forget how amazingly potent and productive he was at the height of his powers. After years of making hypnotic short films throughout the ’70s, he began with The Falls in 1980 and, until he …
Paul Krugman, who is wrong about things slightly less often than he is right about things, was very wrong about something today. “Unless you were a victim or were close to a victim,” he tweeted, “IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU.” With all due respect to the victims of the horrendous mass …
With Hillary Clinton’s victory in California, and her definitive if a tad presumptive anointment by the press as the Official Democratic Candidate for the 2016 elections, we can move from Stupid Season into Silly Season, and from there to Oh God Why Can’t This Just Be Over season. Few people …
