W. C. Fields

Essays

Aug 28, 2000 The acclaimed humorist’s work sees the range of human folly sans romance and piety.

Nov 15, 1999 Great comedy cannot be confined within normally accepted boundaries of taste and sensitivity. The essence of the Pythons was that they were always ready to take on formidable, daunting subjects that others might find too dangerous to contemplate. The idea...

Jan 11, 1999 This epic reimagining of medieval Russia was the most historically audacious production made in the twenty-odd years after Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible.

Nov 23, 1998 Paul Morrissey’s gory comedy may be sensationally shlocky, yet it explores profound ideas about sexual liberty, individualistic freedom, and the commodification of everyday life.

Nov 23, 1998 Harold Shand, the London crime boss at the center of The Long Good Friday, is more than an antihero. He’s the Antichrist, uniting bourgeoisie and barbarians in a simultaneous Pax and Pox Brittanica. With the “legitimate” help of cops and...

Pulp Fiction

Essays

Jun 10, 1996 Ever since Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction created a sensation at [this year’s] Cannes Film Festival, where it won top honors (the Palme d’Or), it has been swathed in the wildest hyperbole. In fact, it has sparked an excitement bound to...

Odd Man Out

Essays

Dec 4, 1995 While Carol Reed’s psychological noir is the most compassionate of movies, it’s a poetic summary of twentieth century harshness—of what can be called the inhuman condition.

Jul 15, 1991 For only his second studio film, Peter Bogdanovich chanced directing an adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s elegiac novel about teenagers who come of age in a dying Texas town in the early fifties.

Annie Hall

Essays

Dec 3, 1990 Over the years I have had a recurrent nightmare in which I am summoned to a large, unfamiliar building in a middle-European satellite country (Bulgaria, perhaps) to tell the idea of Annie Hall to the Bulgarian Minister of Green Lights,...

Dec 11, 1986 If events had turned out differently, Orson Welles’s second film might well be widely regarded as “the greatest film of all time.”

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