Summer blockbuster movies often allow the popular imagination to engage metaphorically with topics that aren’t discussed honestly on the editorial page—topics such as IQ, race, and heredity. (Personally, I don’t think it ought to be necessary to spend tens of millions on computer-generated ...
Perhaps no movie this year generates more concussive laughter from audiences than The Guard. This low-budget, highbrow Irish comedy stars redheaded character actor Brendan Gleeson as a small-town cop in County Galway in the tranquil West of Ireland. Smart, cultured, lazy, and mischievous to the ...
Project Nim is a critically praised documentary about Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee who was the subject of one of those attempts to teach American Sign Language to an ape, a fad that once fascinated the popular imagination. Directed by James Marsh, who won an Oscar for his 2008 documentary Man on ...
I never thought I’d say this about a Harry Potter movie, but the eighth and culminating installment, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, should have been a good half-hour longer. Instead, although saddled with the most convoluted plot of the series, it has the shortest running time. ...
The Guardian, a high-minded leftist broadsheet, had been campaigning for years against Rupert Murdoch’s populist London tabloids. In 2007, private detective Glenn Mulcaire and News of the World royal editor Clive Goodman went to jail for “hacking” into the voicemail accounts of aides to ...
I had long wondered why critics loathe the Transformers movies about giant alien robots more than they hate any other summer blockbuster series. On the other hand, I’d never wondered enough to see one. Unlike reviewers who have to watch every movie that comes out, my policy is: If it sounds ...
Watching the misanthropic comedy Bad Teacher, I was reminded of how my late father-in-law, who supplemented his careers as a tuba player and union boss with a day job in the Chicago public schools as the world’s most cynical substitute teacher, liked to tell this old joke: “I can’t get a ...
Ever since Canadian English professor Marshall McLuhan coined the term “the medium is the message” in 1964, it’s been fun (if not particularly taxing) for intellectuals to speculate about how new communication technologies influence content. One of the most perceptive observers of today’s ...
Bill James, the baseball statistics analyst who has been one of the most revolutionary influences upon American sport and thought over the last generation, has now published a non-baseball book, Popular Crime: Reflections on the Celebration of Violence, which grows out of his decades-long ...
X-Men: First Class is the fifth screen adaptation since 2000 of the Marvel Comics series. What’s the appeal of these Homo superior mutants whose superpowers cause them to be oppressed by the bigoted and backward majority, us genetically inferior Homo sapiens? Well, every adolescent sees himself ...
