The Old Young People

Mar 8, 2021 — “I see the beauty now,” my mother told me when I asked her what she thought of Cicely Tyson’s face, about a week after the pathbreaking actor died in January at ninety-six. “But I didn’t then.” By “then,” she meant...

Feb 24, 2021 — Hollywood is the unofficial ministry of propaganda for the United States. Newcomers to this country typically begin their process of Americanization well before they arrive, having been exposed, for quite some time, to the long-distance bombardment of American blockbusters. In...

Jan 19, 2021 — In the summer of 1976, my parents took me to see the tall ships in New York Harbor. I was ten, and I remember very little about it other than that I went and that the ships, tall, did not...

Nov 10, 2020 — The coming-of-age drama is generally thought of as portraying adolescence—the sexual awakening, the high-school cliques, the angst about the future. At least that’s the assumption on which Hollywood has profitably based its avalanche of teen pics for lo these many...

Oct 15, 2020 — Songbook According to Kraftwerk member Wolfgang Flür, it was toward the end of the group’s first U.S. tour when his bandmates Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider grew fascinated by the phenomenon of American radio. Their time in the States had...

Oct 9, 2020 — In Scoundrels & Spitballers: Writers and Hollywood in the 1930s, veteran French journalist Philippe Garnier brings to life an enchantingly raffish community of typewriter-pounders who headed west to try their luck in the verbal gold rush set off by the...

Sep 30, 2020 — Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project No. 3 More than eight decades since its release, Dos monjes (1934) continues to invite reappraisals, as much for its expressionist style—exceptional within Mexican cinema—as for its nonlinear narrative and for the creative contributions of...

Sep 22, 2020 — Francesco Rosi’s film Christ Stopped at Eboli (1979) is based on Carlo Levi’s novelistic memoir of the same name, which became an instant classic of Italian literature when it appeared at the end of World War II, in 1945. In...

Aug 17, 2020 — Deep Dives Baseball’s back in America—as of this writing, anyway—though for much of spring and early summer the Major League season hung in the balance as negotiations between the owners and the players’ union approached a peak of acrimony. Being...

Aug 13, 2020 — First Person In 1960 The Apartment was playing at Cinema Rialto and was advertised with a loud red poster. I was too young to see it at the time, but I do recall overhearing my parents describing it to their...