Writing history

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

Funny enough to be real

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

There’s a kind of nostalgia for the Cold War, almost in the same way that British culture incorporates a nostalgia … More

In our trawl through Humphrey Bogart’s oeuvre we’ve been sticking to the best known movies—he acted in over seventy films. … More

A musician’s life is usually precarious, especially if you’re attempting to work as a featured artist. Llewyn Davis, as played … More

Humphrey Bogart reputedly occupied something of a lonely place among his Hollywood peers—although he had his good friends, Louise Brooks, … More

Coen Brothers genre pieces are rarely without an ironic twist or two, a knowing nod to the implausibilities of the … More

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is a film that’s been lurking in my brain since childhood, having been on … More

Having watched a lot of Coen Brothers movies lately, I’m starting to see their kind of purposefully aimless plotting as … More

Roger Deakins’s brilliant cinematography has been conspicuous in some of the Coen Brothers’s films—in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, for … More