Blog

I don't understand the meaning of the strange Iranian film, Gabbeh (1996). Its protagonist is a girl who yearns to wed a man who howls exactly like a wolf but doesn't seem to be one.  He's a man.  A lot happens, even so---a mystifying lot---before the couple elope on...

Brian Moore's novel, The Colour of Blood, was published in 1987, before the fall of Communism in the Soviet bloc.  Its engaging action occurs in an unnamed Eastern European country, and the leader of the Catholic church there, Cardinal Bem, is a man honorable and...

Aldo Ray is a mere marionette of an actor in Jacques Tourneur's Nightfall (1957) and Anne Bancroft provides little personality in her role.  But the film itself is a knockout, finely directed and savvily adapted from a novel by screenwriter Stirling Silliphant.  It...

Matthew Weiner, the creator of the series Mad Men, is probably more politically liberal than conservative, and yet a final-season episode of his show acknowledges that Nixon, in 1969, was trying to end the Vietnam War, something leftists all over the country strongly...

Needless to say, the computer-animated The Peanuts Movie (2015) contains a lot of humor.  What it lacks is the excellent wit of Charles Schulz's A Charlie Brown Christmas and, of course, the comic strip, although this is not to say it completely lacks wit.  No, sir....

I wish the creators of Jane the Virgin hadn't made Luisa a lesbian because, as far as I'm concerned, Yara Martinez, who plays her, is too lovely to be one.  (Lipstick lesbians are too lovely to be lesbians.)  But, well, make her one they did; and so what we have is...

Rambling Rose (1991), starring Laura Dern, pretends to be consequential but isn't.  It's as trivial as that 1984 flick with Sally Field, Places in the Heart, which at least features a nice slice of Christianity.  Rose has no real interest at all in Christianity and no...

Preston Sturges based his script for The Lady Eve (1941) on a story by one Monckton Hoffe and then directed what was one of the best screwball comedies of the Hollywood-studio years.  In it, a father-and-daughter con artist team attempts to bamboozle a wealthy young...

The "girls of slender means" in Muriel Spark's 1963 novel of the same name live in a London hostel during the virtual end of the Second World War.  Economically poor, they are also morally unformed---wayward.  But among them the Catholic Spark has fashioned a...