Anna Karenina
An interesting and engaging adaptation of Tolstoy’s novel which might even signal a wider cultural turning away from the liberationist view of sexual passion
Zero Dark Thirty
A rather thrilling if unbalanced account of the hunt for and killing of Osama bin Laden which has been unfairly attacked for advocating torture
Entry from January 17, 2013
“Corleone apologises for decades of Mafia murders,” read the headline in yesterday’s (London) Daily Telegraph. Corleone, the Sicilian hill town that is synonymous with the Mafia through books and films, has asked forgiveness for the murders, shootings and intimidation committed by its godfathers. The appeal was made by the mayor of the town on the…
Django Unchained
A farrago of fake blood, movie pastiche and historical nonsense whose rapturous critical reception tells you all you need to know about the state of the culture
Entry from January 10, 2013
As is not unusual, The New York Times has rather overdemonstrated its point in enthusiastic approval of President Obama’s nomination of former Senator Chuck Hagel to be Secretary of Defense. Today it’s columnist Nicholas D. Kristof who writes in familiar vein. “I’m not a pacifist. I believe in using force, but only after a very careful…
The Cycle Repeats
On “austerity” and not being “one of us” — From The New Criterion of December, 2012
Central Park Five, The
A new documentary about the Central Park Jogger case of 1989 is as simple minded as the media campaign that sent five innocent boys to prison
Hyde Park on Hudson
A historically dubious romp with a fun-loving FDR which nevertheless manages to get one or two big things right
Entry from December 27, 2012
In the season of good will toward men, the death of Robert Bork has proved to be the occasion for at least one left-leaning writer to look again, and with a more charitable gaze, on the first recorded incident of “Borking” in 1987. That was when, as no one on the right is ever likely to…
Entry from December 18, 2012
Yesterday I found myself driving behind someone who was sporting a bumper-sticker on his car that read: “An armed society is a polite society.” What an irony, I thought, if some of those who, in the wake of the Newtown, Connecticut, shootings, are reportedly sending death-threats to officials of the NRA today should decide to…
Entry from December 12, 2012
Over at BookForum, Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland, reviews The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left by Landon R.Y. Storrs, published by Princeton University Press. According to Mr Perlstein, Ms Storrs, a professor at the University of Iowa, purports to answer Werner Sombart’s famous question of 1906, “Why is there…
Silver Linings Playbook
A funny and moving picture about living and loving in spite of the everyday forms of madness love breeds in us