Critics At Large

Liu Yifei in Mulan (2020).   It may look like a film and quack like a film, but something’s just not right with the new Mulan , based on the...

Joan Blondell and James Cagney in He Was Her Man (1934).   This is the third in an ongoing series of discussions of classic pairings of scr...

“It was a trivializing, peripheral, silly sort of event, in the best uptown tradition,” Germaine Greer said in 2004 of the panel discussion ...

Tony Scott's Music for Zen Meditation . (Verve Records, 1964)   “We ought to listen to music or sit and practice breathing at the beginn...

Dame Diana Rigg (1938-2020) as Emma Peel in the 1960s TV series The Avengers . (Photo: Terry Disney) Diana Rigg, who died on September 10 at...

Mark Hamill in Corvette Summer (1978). When TCM ran Corvette Summer not long ago, I decided to take another look at it. The last ti...

A frame from Kirk Tougas' The Framing of Perception (1973). The monolith-like altar of ultra-consumption ironically reveals that we o...

Bobby Cannavale, Audrey Tautou and John Turturro in The Jesus Rolls (2019). It takes guts these days to remake Bertrand Blier’s freew...

Tim McIntire (seated) in American Hot Wax (1978). Aloha Bobby and Rose , about the doomed romance of a pair of Angelenos, a car mechan...

Engraving of Xavier de Maistre, by Cyprien Jacquemin, 1820. “Imagination, realm of enchantment—which the most beneficent of beings b...

Gordon Lightfoot in Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind (2019) The Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot attained fame...

Charles Dance and Geraldine James in The Jewel in the Crown (1984). Many of us who have longed to see our favorite literary sagas rend...

Last Photo of Andy Warhol Alive (1987) by Peter Bellamy: “I was walking down Central Park West when I saw Andy Warhol being visited by ...

Barrington Stage Company artistic director Julianne Boyd (left) with Mark H. Dold during rehearsal for Harry Clarke . (Courtesy Barringto...

Hiccup (voiced by Jay Baruchel) and Toothless in How to Train Your Dragon (2010). This review contains spoilers. The How to Train Y...

Lin-Manuel Miranda and Philippa Sooi n Hamilton . Like at least half of my friends, I bought a subscription to Disney+ so I could watc...

Jane Levy in Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist . This review contains spoilers. Listen. You know how sometimes a song pops into your head...

Charlize Theron and KiKi Layne in The Old Guard (2020), now streaming on Netflix. This review contains spoilers. Following up on th...

Ornette Coleman performing at The Hague in 1994 in 1994. (Photo: Geert Vandepoele ) “Music, faces worn by time, want to tell us someth...

Harry Belafonte in Tonight with Belafonte (1959). A friend who was trolling through YouTube this week came across something truly ext...