Letters from Iwo Jima

It is fascinating how, although Hollywood has implicitly believed in every crackpot conspiracy theory for decades and has been willing to attribute to the democratically elected government of the United States any and all perfidies, it retains a sentimental attachment to the idea of the presidency. The image of the good king dies hard in…

An anti-traditional look at the latest in criminality which is saved — at least in terms of box office success — by its politically suspect belly-laughs

Near the end of The Mod Squad one of the three drop-dead hip teen cops, Pete Cochran (Giovanni Ribisi), says to another, Julie Barnes (Claire Danes): “Dirty cops, drops at the airport: I feel like one of us should say, ‘We’re getting too old for this s***’.” Julie replies: “At least it’s not going down…

In the New York Times‘s review of East-West, a Franco-Russian production directed by Régis Wargnier, A.O. Scott noted that, on its release in France last year, the film had been criticized for “its supposed anti-Communism” but that, it seemed to him, “its politics are fairly restrained.” How typical of the New York Times to assume…

Peeping Tom by Michael Powell first appeared in this country in 1960, and it is often compared with Psycho, the work of another British-born filmmaker from the same year. But where Psycho was widely regarded as its auteur’s masterpiece, Peeping Tom got such a critical slating that it all but ended Powell’s career prematurely. Nowadays…

A touching documentary portrait of a not-quite tragic fall from what passes these days for greatness