Rhyming cinema

One thing I’ve had reinforced through watching the Rudolph Maté directed Robert Mitchum vehicle Second Chance (1953), is the total … More

Surface is depth

Orlando is a very complex and sophisticated film based on a very complex and sophisticated book which I haven’t read. … More

The American economy has had its ups and downs—in the 1970s manufacturing crashed so badly that several large cities were … More

Hidden Figures tells the long untold story of the black women who worked as mathematicians at NASA in the 1950s … More

Certain times in certain places almost produce stories by themselves. Post Second World War Vienna was one such, a city … More

Watching the second film in our self-selected route through Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series, I had in my mind the … More

I don’t come from Suffolk, but I’ve lived here the vast majority of my adult life, and I have family … More

One of the books that has made the greatest impact on me is Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun. … More

History is what we write about our past—it’s the origin story a culture constructs for itself, from a variety of … More

Black comedy crime dramas with inconclusive endings are almost a genre of their own now. The trick is to keep … More

Watching John Ford’s acclaimed Western The Searchers gave me occasion to note how incomplete my education in cinema is, and … More

Gold is a recurring symbol in American cinema, a useful stand-in when directors want to establish a dialectic between self-interest … More

So much discourse and tale-telling has entered our small house through the tiny window of our television—no bigger than the … More

With The Caine Mutiny, Humphrey Bogart continued his drift away from movie-star roles, playing a part in which his character … More