Romeo and Juliet Balcony  Verona, Italy

When You’re a Remake

Like The Great Gatsby, the enduring fame of West Side Story is due to two factors: Many people encounter it during high school (because teachers show the 1961 movie when trying to ...

Licorice Pizza

‘Licorice Pizza’: Local Boy Makes Good

Paul Thomas Anderson’s critically acclaimed Licorice Pizza is his response to Quentin Tarantino’s similarly nostalgic Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood. As you may recall, I was ...

‘Dune’: Old Spice in a New Age

Dune is an extraordinarily impressive (if not utterly enjoyable) adaptation of the first half of the epic 1965 science-fiction novel that George Lucas borrowed heavily from for ...

The End Game

The wedding was marvelous, the weather superb. Crowds ten deep along the mall to Windsor Castle. An American bride for the warrior-prince. The pubs rang out with cheers “To the ...

Herman Mankiewicz

That Touch of ‘Mank’

The best movie comedies of the 1930s were largely written by former newspaper reporters who had also tried their hand at writing for the New York stage before being seduced by ...

James Norton in Mr. Jones

Keeping Up With ‘Mr. Jones’

In the biopic Mr. Jones, the insidious Peter Sarsgaard plays Walter Duranty, the sinister New York Times Moscow correspondent who covered up Stalin’s Ukraine famine of the early ...

Rise of the Crypto-Caucasians

There’s an old saying I just coined: “You can ignore the race war, but the race war won’t ignore you.” No matter how insulated you think you are, the people in this ...

‘Hamilton’: The Obama Administration on Stage

Before I finally watched Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s colossally popular Broadway musical depicting the Founding Fathers as rapping Men of Color, I had never heard that it’s ...

“Roast in Hell, Old White Man”

Hollywood’s moral compass points in only one direction—the wrong way. There is no better example of Hollywood’s inverted sense of morality than the fact that as our ...

Ellen DeGeneres

America’s Lesbian Sweetheart

Ellen DeGeneres was born with this face, and that’s the plain truth. If you think there’s any more nuanced or complicated reason beyond that for why she “became” a ...

Mo'Nique

Bleeding Hearts and Bloody Whores

I’ll begin this week’s sermon, I mean column, with the Parable of the Hemorrhaging Mexican Whore. I used to have this friend—I won’t say his name because he’s an actor ...

Call of Duty: ‘1917’

2019 turned out to be a good year for quality guy movies after all, as several veteran directors ignored the anti-male zeitgeist and just shot the films they’ve long wanted to ...

‘Little Women’: Tween Tale

The umpteenth remake of Little Women, Louisa May Alcott’s witty 1868 girls’ novel about growing up in Concord, Massachusetts, during the Civil War, is directed by Greta Gerwig ...

Hollywood Conservatives’ Year of Self-Harm

This should’ve been a happy Christmas for right-wing cinephiles like myself. The “social justice” horror film Black Christmas landed with the squishy thud of Oprah slipping ...

‘Richard Jewell’: The Problem With Profiling

Richard Jewell is director Clint Eastwood’s well-acted, solidly scripted biopic about the racial-profiling fiasco that undermined the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bombing ...

Christopher Plummer

The U.K. vs. U.S. Detective Debate

The mystery movie Knives Out is an allegory about how Americans deserve to lose our homeland to Latin American immigrants out of our self-destructive hatred for each other. But ...


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