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Magic Bullets
One of the most unresolved crimes, at least as far as conspiracy theorists go, is the JFK assassination in 1963. Besides the dozens of books on the subject, there are many films which Phil Dyess-Nugent...
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Houdini of the Dance
For those who never considered choreography as the art of the magic, you need to read Deirdre Kelly writing in Critics at Large about Claudia Moore.Now You See Her, Now You Don't: Dancer Claudia...
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Beyond Cable
More and more people are abandoning cable, or at least, turning online to stream and download television shows. One popular site to take advantage of this is Netflix, which launched House of Cards and...
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Sojourn Through the American Heartland
Usually when a Coen brothers' film opens, there's quite a fanfare among their followers. With their latest, Inside Llewyn Davis, it began that way and then it disappeared into history like its main...
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B-Movie Shakespeare
Joss Whedon has brought great emotional sophistication to popular themes in mass culture (such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer), but could he do the same to the great literature of the Bard? Amanda...
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Strange Hybrid
There's probably nothing worse in a dramatic series when it loses its nerve and jettisons its strongest ideas, as David Churchill discovered watching the BBC mini-series Exile. When Mash-Ups Won't...
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Rabble-Rousing
The political legacy of former President Lyndon Johnson has long been overshadowed by the tragedy of Vietnam. As a result, a more nuanced view of Johnson's term, where his liberalism was put in...
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Man in the Shadows
Not all pop artists who make significant contributions to the work of others get the recognition they perhaps deserve when releasing their own work. Devin McKinney examines the work of one such artist...
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Connecting the Present to the Past
The detective novel is not a genre you normally look to for reflections into the personal life of the writer, but as Bob Douglas points out in Critics at Large, Sara Paretsky's work is the exception....
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The Illuminating Backdrop
Director Sophia Coppola doesn't make movies driven so much by plot as they are by mood and suggestion. Nick Coccoma examines in Critics at Large how that quality enhances her latest film.Mimetic...
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Common Ground
Our obsessions with pop figures sometimes takes on the staging of a turf war when it comes to defending their work against others who claim similarity. That was nowhere more than in the case of Lou...
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Progenies
The great iconic actors have a way of being reborn in the lives of future generations - often with chilling similarities. Susan Green in Critics at Large examines the examples of James Dean and River...
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Objects of Love
There are movies that serve as literal adaptations of the novels they are based on. But there are others, like Max Ophuls'The Earrings of Madame De..., that also seem to call up other books that better...
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Resurrection: Pete Townshend on Tommy
Since it is Easter, it seemed appropriate to turn to a rock opera with its own Christ story that continues to be resurrected: The Who's Tommy. Deirdre Kelly spoke to its creator Pete Townshend last...
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Zeitgeist Redux
Mad Men has just begun its seventh and final season. Many are split on whether or not the show has successfully caught the temper of the era of the Sixties. Even so, the late David Churchill (who...
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Pop Obsessions
In the early years of television a program's fan base could never fully influence a network's decision to keep it on the air. But now in the age of social media, a fan can let his pop obsessions be...
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Mendacity and Truth
When it comes to aesthetics and politics, nobody blurred the line between the two and created unresolvable arguments concerning both like Leni Riefenstahl. Bob Douglas writing in Critics at Large...
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Ghosts
We all know the way that songs can haunt us our whole life where they can immediately invoke a time and place that's buried in memory. But Kevin Courrier in Critics at Large also examines how the...
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Poirot R.I.P.
As Agatha Christie's iconic detective Hercule Poirot came to a conclusion on television, Shlomo Schwartzberg revisited the series in Critics at Large with fond nostalgia. The Virtues of Old Fashioned...
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Happy Gazing
Racing car movies for some reason seldom work as drama, but Ron Howard's Rush certainly did. Phil Dyess-Nugent suggested how and why in his review from Critics at Large.Face Value: Ron Howard's...
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The Power of the Performance
God knows there have been many great productions of Hamlet (and some bad ones, too), but Steve Vineberg writing in Critics at Large hasn't seen a Hamlet performance of quite the calibre of Rory...
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The Family Romance
Although we live in an age of sexual explicitness, perhaps than in any other period of human history, it doesn't mean we have solved the mysteries of sex and repression. Writer Amanda Shubert found...
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Tonal Trouble
When a director of Jonathan Demme's caliber sets out to tackle Ibsen, it can raise your expectations until you discover that Demme would perhaps find a more companionable relationship with Chekhov....
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Counterfeit Sex
Gillian Flynn's novel of a highly dysfunctional couple, a marriage of ciphers, was a sensation when it came out. When David Fincher directed the adaptation, many admirers cited the satire. Nick Coccoma...
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Unapologetically Adult
Probably the hardest thing to accomplish when depicting a famous superhero before they became one is sacrificing the tropes we've come to identify with them. Mark Clamen in Critics at Large suggests...
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