Critics At Large

Robert Shaw as Sam Quint, in Jaws (2005). On America’s annual Fourth of July this month, I lazily tuned into a late-night cable bro...

The Girl Who Played With Fire , which opens in North America today, is a significant improvement on its predecessor, The Girl With The Drago...

In one of history’s most insidious social experiments, after the April 1975 overthrow of the Cambodian government, the Khmer Rouge bega...

Ever since I played on the remains of my maternal grandfather's one-and-only car back in the 1960s, I've been fascinated by cars and...

Along with some of the forgettable pictures I mentioned yesterday, there was one riveting movie I did catch up with in recent months – ...

Ever since “losing” my job as a freelance film critic for Metro Newspaper last fall, I’ve spent very little time going out to movies. Wher...

Crossover is a term used in the music business that refers to an artist from one genre "crossing over" to another. Its most famili...

Not since the Harry Potter novels has a series of books so connected with such a wide variety of readers as the Stieg Larsson mysteries...

The Last Airbender , which went into wide release this week, is based on Avatar: The Last Airbender , an animated series produced by the Ame...

Let me be blunt. Films or mini-series about the war in the Pacific in World War II have been few and far between because it was one giganti...

“The media are all-knowing. They supply a community of knowledge and feelings, and a common morality. Many people, literate and illiterate ...

Herbie Hancock is one of my musical heroes because he’s constantly trying new things and takes none of his talent for playing, writing and a...

As a child, Michael Hastings dreamed of becoming a war correspondent.  “I remember drawing a map of the Middle East and watching CNN nightl...

I've never been one for the nostalgia musical acts that hit the road every summer (The Monkees, Crosby Stills & Nash, REO Speedwagon...

When I was extremely young my parents gave me a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle action figure for my birthday. My friends and I would get toge...

A colleague of mine, who didn’t know John Mellencamp, asked me what he would be remembered for in music. I said, the song “Cherry Bomb” one ...

Gone are the days of television producers holding out for that mythical 100th episode in order to guarantee a syndicated afterlife foll...

Knight and Day , Tom Cruise’s latest movie, which opens today, is a reminder, once again, of how he simply can’t hold up his end of the bar...

The first-season finale of Treme on June 20 was titled “I’ll Fly Away,” and the 1929 gospel song about loss and redemption is performed ...

The Whole Wide World , based on the 1986 memoir One Who Walked Alone by Novalyne Price Ellis, is a small gem. Set in the early ‘30s, the p...