Lunchbox, The
A touching and well-made movie from India whose motto, worthy of emulation by Hollywood, is "less is more"
Grand Budapest Hotel
Impossible to be taken seriously, the movie is nevertheless quite a lot of fun, mostly because of its star.
Unhappy Anniversary
Wars in history and history wars in Britain and the U.S. — From The New Criterion of February, 2014
Entry from February 22, 2014
One problem with being the proud possessor, as so many people are these days, of a change-the-world ideology of your very own, is that you come to think of the world as having already been changed in accordance with your ideology’s specifications — which can lead to further problems. Charles Krauthammer called attention to the…
Monuments Men
An awful movie on a subject that deserves — and has received — a lot better
Entry from February 19, 2014
In the forthcoming number of The New Criterion, I return to my theme in the magazine of last December and October of 2012, when I discussed the growing penchant in our political culture for each side to make frivolous, reckless and often quite unfounded accusations of bad faith against the other. This is true on both…
Frozen in Ideological Time
Pop cultural fantasy as a re-mythologization of the culture in the “progressive” interest — From The American Spectator of January-February, 2014
Entry from February 12, 2014
In Monday’s Daily Telegraph blogs, I noticed the following piquant headline to a posting by Cristina Odone: “Vladimir Putin has made it impossible for me to be against gay marriage.” Gosh! I have a lot of respect for Vlad’s powers of persuasion, but how did he do that? “I have written before,” writes Ms Odone,…
The Invisible Woman
An enjoyable account of Charles Dickens’s love affair with a much younger woman whose historicity, however, must remain largely speculative
Casualties of War
Medicine as metaphor for the Western Front — From The Weekly Standard of February 3, 2014
Liberal 2.0
On the crafting of some media “narratives” — From The New Criterion of January, 2014
Lone Survivor
A thrilling, true-life account of American heroism in Afghanistan in 2005 and an end-around Hollywood’s leftist politics