Critics At Large

Jerry Jeff Walker, 1942-2020. (Photo: Paul Natkin) Jerry Jeff Walker, who succumbed on October 23, at seventy-eight, to the throat cancer th...

Jim Parsons, Robin de Jesus, Michael Benjamin Washington and Andrew Rannells in The Boys in the Band (2020), now streaming on Netflix.   The...

  “Filmmaking is more athletics than art and filmmaking comes from the thighs.” – Werner Herzog, 2011. Yes, this is an art review, even tho...

A scene from Barbara Kopple's Desert One . Operation Eagle Claw, the aborted attempt by a Delta Force crew in April 1980 to rescue fifty...

Boston Mayor Marty Walsh in Frederick Wiseman's City Hall . Still turning out documentaries at ninety, Frederick Wiseman is one of the ...

No 2. (2020), acrylic, Plexiglas, goldleaf on aluminum, 8 x 8 inches (Odon Wagner Gallery). “If we keep our eyes open in a totally dark plac...

Pierre Fresnay in Monsieur Vincent (1947). Movies about men and women of faith are usually tepid and sentimental, but a few are extraordin...

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 ...