The Son

Sep 30, 2008 — 9 August 2008: I go to the neighborhood theater to see Snow Trail (a.k.a. To the End of the Silver Mountains, a.k.a. Ginrei no haté), a 1946 Senkichi Taniguchi film now revived because it was Toshiro Mifune’s second film. Revived...

Jul 26, 1993 — But for the recalcitrance of RKO, Evergreen could have been the finest of Fred Astaire’s movies. Instead, it was never an Astaire film, but “merely” the best musical ever made in England, and the finest film of the legendary Jessie...

Mar 22, 1993 — Elizabethan prodigal prodigy Christopher Marlowe, whose tantalizingly brief life ended in political assassination, wrote a history play, in the mid-1590s, about the 1327 political assassinations of England’s Edward II and his lover and boyhood friend, Piers Gaveston. Rarely performed, Edward...

Nov 19, 1989 — Almost as long as they’ve been able to talk, films have been able to sing and dance. Frequently high-style, often rapturously romantic, most musicals have nonetheless been content to remain light, sophisticated entertainment. Still, there has always been a minority...

Jun 7, 2016 — “One of the discoveries of the road movies was not only that you could travel and work and make a film at the same time, and improvise it, but that rock and roll could also be, in the true sense,...

Jul 24, 2014 — Everyday life gets a musical makeover in Jacques Demy’s tale of chance and love, a film of exquisitely sad happiness.

Apr 9, 2012 — Among the lasting artistic contributions to American culture of the great Paul Robeson (born on this date in 1898) was his beautiful, booming singing voice. In addition to being an actor, activist, and orator, Robeson was a star of the concert hall....

Jul 19, 2021 — When Dennis Lehane joked in 2011 that the only real difference between Greek tragedy and noir was that in the former characters fall from great heights and in the latter they drop from the curb, he was pinpointing something simultaneously...

Oct 13, 2016 — This morning, we were delighted to learn that Bob Dylan has been awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature for creating “new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”

Sep 29, 2014 — The Toronto-based songwriter-producer Austin Garrick is one-half (alongside vocalist Bronwyn Griffin) of the electronic pop duo Electric Youth, whose full-length debut album, Innerworld, was released in September 2014 by Secretly Canadian/Last Gang Records. Garrick’s music is known to fans of...