LetterA
RangeA - Ac
RangeAd - Ag
RangeAh - Ak
RangeAl - Ao
Authoral, Elizabeth M. Lynskey, et.
Authoral, Geoffrey Stone, et.
Authoral, George N. Shuster, et.
Authoral, J. Corson Miller, et.
Authoral, Michael Williams, et.
Authoral-Gharbi, Musa
Authoral., William V. D'Antonio, et
AuthorAlaigh, Arvin
AuthorAlan'Paton
AuthorAlaya, Flavia
AuthorAlbacete, Lorenzo
AuthorAlbertson, David
AuthorAlbright, Madeleine
AuthorAldridge, Joanne Brannon
AuthorAlech, Alice
AuthorAleman, Tiina
AuthorAleshire, Daniel
AuthorAlessandrini, Federico
AuthorALEXANDER, LYNETTA LEWIS
AuthorAlexander, Robert J.
AuthorAlfred, William
AuthorAlgeria, Joel
AuthorAlice, Mary
AuthorAlison, James
AuthorAlito
AuthorALLAIN, JAY
AuthorALLAIN, R. JAY
AuthorAlland, Sonia
AuthorAllard, Gerald
AuthorAllen, Charlotte
AuthorALLEN, DEXTER
AuthorAllen, Diogenes
AuthorAllen, Frances N. S.
AuthorAllen, Hugh
AuthorAllen, John L. Jr.
AuthorAllen, Lafe F.
AuthorAllen, Lafe Franklin
AuthorAllen, Lale Franklin
AuthorAllen, Leonard A.
AuthorAllen, Louis
AuthorAllen, Margaret Pinckney
AuthorAllen, Rodger Van
AuthorAllen, Sally EUiott
AuthorAllen, Sara Van Alstyne
AuthorAllen, Sarah Van Alstyne
AuthorAllen, William S.
AuthorAllerdice, Cornelia
AuthorAllers, Rudolf
AuthorAlleva, Richard
Paid articlePope Francis: A Man of His Word (August 2018)
FILM Richard Alleva The Right Man for the Job WIM WENDERS'S 'POPE FRANCIS: A MAN OF HIS WORD' Ireally wanted to hate Pope Francis: A Man of His Word but couldn't bring myself to do it. In fact,...
Paid articleBeguiled, Wonder Woman, Baby Driver (August 2017)
FILM Richard Alleva Blockbusting 'THE BEGUILED,' 'WONDER WOMAN,' 'BABY DRIVER' In the world of moviemaking, where genre entertainments can rake in big profits but also grind a filmmaker's...
Paid articleNorman (June 2017)
FILM Richard Alleva Waving & Drowning 'NORMAN' Power is certainly seductive, but the seduction is not always sexual. Not just trophy wives and mistresses but also hangers-on, go-betweens,...
Paid articlePaterson (March 2017)
FILM Richard Alleva Grounded 'PATERSON' Recently I wrote of Manchester by the Sea that one "rarely comes across a film that captures the drift and flow of daily life and conveys its pungent...
Paid articleManchester by the Sea & Fences (February 2017)
FILM Richard Alleva Character Studies 'MANCHESTER BY THE SEA' & 'FENCES' Even a frequent moviegoer rarely comes across a film that captures the drift and flow of daily life and conveys its...
Paid articleLoving (January 2017)
FILM Richard Alleva Stay-at-Home Heroes 'LOVING' Aman is sleeping beside his wife late at night in their bedroom. Suddenly the door crashes open and an intruder flashes a light in their eyes,...
Paid articleMoonlight (December 2016)
FILM Richard Alleva No Refuge 'MOONLIGHT' Moonlight is a blazing iceberg of a movie. Blazing because of the passion that informs every shot, an iceberg because so much of its meaning resides...
Paid articleBirth of a Nation (November 2016)
FILM Richard Alleva An American Spartacus 'BIRTH OF A NATION' There is no way to turn the story of Nat Turner into an entertainment that is morally neat and emotionally digestible. The worst...
Paid articleCafé Society & Florence Foster Jenkins (September 2016)
FILM Richard Alleva Fragile Illusions 'CAFE SOCIETY' & 'FLORENCE FOSTER JENKINS' Cafe Society s plot is a repository for all the familiar Woody Allen themes. In 1935 a young Jewish nai'f, Bobby...
Paid articleThe Innocents (August 2016)
FILM Richard Alleva Cloistered Crimes 'THE INNOCENTS' In the very first minute of Anne Fontaine's The Innocents, serenity fills the screen.. .and is quickly shattered. We're in a convent chapel...
Paid articleMoney Monster (June 2016)
FILM Richard Alleva Spectacle & Speculation 'MONEY MONSTER' Can a movie be too entertaining? More specifically, can a film that's trying to convey a social critique be so much fun to watch that...
Paid articleBorn to Be Blue & Miles Ahead (May 2016)
FILM Richard Alleva Jazzmen 'BORN TO BE BLUE' & 'MILES AHEAD' Miles Davis and Chet Baker: two trumpet-playing international stars of jazz (though Davis bridled at the word and preferred "social...
Paid articleChimes at Midnight (March 2016)
FILM Richard Alleva Shakespeare’s Epic Scoundrel 'CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT' Just in time to relieve the post-Oscar doldrums comes the reappearance of Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight, the 1966...
Paid articleThe Revenant (February 2016)
FILM Richard Alleva Bear Slobber & Corny Mysticism 'THE REVENANT' One of the first shots The Rev-enant presents us with is a wide view of a wintry landscape somewhere in the Louisiana Purchase...
Paid articleRoom (January 2016)
FILM Richard Alleva Room without a View 'ROOM' Psycho-stalker horror and the quiet drama of family relationships might seem to be incompatible genres, but Emma Donoghue married them successfully...
Paid articleSpotlight & Truth (December 2015)
FILM Richard Alleva The Big Dig 'SPOTLIGHT' & 'TRUTH' Before the so-called Second Golden Age of Television was launched on cable, the one network show that captivated me (and in re-runs still...
Paid articleThe Martian & Bridge of Spies (November 2015)
FILM Richard Alleva Men on a Mission ‘THE MARTIAN’ & ‘BRIDGE OF SPIES’ To hell with postmodern irony. Here are two unabashedly earnest movies with straightarrow heroes: The Martian...
Paid articleBlack Mass (October 2015)
FILM Richard Alleva Magnetic Menace 'BLACK MASS' Any moviegoer hearing of a new gangster movie has a right to ask, "Why another?" The genre's tropes—the protagonist's rise to the top over the...
Paid articleIrrational Man (September 2015)
FILM Richard Alleva Curiously Incurious 'IRRATIONAL MAN' You will never see a movie better designed or more carefully premeditated than Woody Allen’s Irrational Man. Notwithstanding the film’s...
Paid articleAmy (August 2015)
FILM Richard Alleva Casualty of the Fame Machine 'AMY' Right after I saw Asif Kapadia's riveting documentary Amy, about the brilliantly talented and pathetically vulnerable pop singer Amy...
Paid articleEx Machina (June 2015)
FILM Richard Alleva Robomance 'EX MACHINA' Ex Machina is a deceptive movie about deceptions: the deception of attractive surfaces, the deception at the heart of a scientific experiment, the...
Paid articleLeviathan (April 2015)
FILM Richard Alleva Rotten from the Head Down 'LEVIATHAN' Feeling emotionally robust, moviegoer? You'd better be if you intend to see Leviathan, the acclaimed Golden Globe winner and Oscar...
Paid articleMr. Turner (March 2015)
FILM Richard Alleva Beastly Genius 'MR. TURNER' Mr. Turner is a movie about a walking oxymoron: a man-troll who plods through the streets as if he were carrying ten-pound hods on each shoulder;...
Paid articleA case for 'soft supersessionism' FiLM Selma (February 2015)
FILM Richard Alleva A Usable Myth 'SELMA' In his play Mary Stuart (1800), Friedrich Schiller invents a scene in which the imprisoned Mary, Queen of Scotland, meets her captor, Elizabeth I, and...
Paid articleUnbroken & The Imitation Game (February 2015)
FILM Richard Alleva Hidden Heroes 'UNBROKEN' & 'THE IMITATION GAME' Dramatizing the full story of Louis Zamperini’s life—as recounted in Laura Hillenbrand’s bestselling book, Unbroken—would...
Paid articleHow John Updike made it look easy FiLM Birdman (January 2015)
FILM Richard Alleva Blockbusted 'BIRDMAN' We’ve all seen terrific movies about the theater—All About Eve, Les Enfants du Paradis, Topsy-Turvy, among many others. And if you’re familiar with the...
Paid articleRosewater (December 2014)
FILM Richard Alleva Spooks & Creeps 'ROSEWATER' & 'NIGHTCRAWLER' When good writers contemplate evil, they write something like Macbeth or No Country for Old Men. When they detect stupidity, they...
Paid articleGone Girl (November 2014)
FILM Richard Alleva Exile on Main Street 'GONE GIRL' Like the best-selling novel it’s based on, Gone Girl proceeds on three levels. First, it is a mystery story replete with clues, stratagems,...
Paid articleLove is Strange (October 2014)
FILM Richard Alleva Manhattan Story 'LOVE IS STRANGE' Sometimes a work of fiction can bear witness to a profound social transformation by taking it for granted. Such is the case with Love Is...
Paid articleCalvary (September 2014)
FILM Richard Alleva Ecce Sligo 'CALVARY' Calvary belongs in that select company of films (Diary of a Country Priest, I Confess, Under the Sun of Satan, and a very few others) that deal...
Paid articleUnder the Skin Only Lovers Left Alive (June 2014)
SCREEN Richard Alleva Artful Schlock, Arty Dreck 'UNDER THE SKIN' & 'ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE' As I watched Jonathan Glaz-er's critically acclaimed Under the Skin, I suddenly found myself wanting...
Paid articleNoah (May 2014)
FILM Richard Alleva Deluge & Delusion 'NOAH' Hot on the heels of the impersonal and saccharine Son of God comes the daringly idiosyncratic and totally depressing Noah by writer-director Darren...
Paid articleSon of God (April 2014)
FILM Richard Alleva Treacle 'SON OF GOD' The evangelistic fervor of producers Mark Burnett and Roma Downey and director Christopher Spencer is evident throughout Son of God, the culmination of...
Paid articleThe Master (March 2014)
FILM Richard Alleva The Master REMEMBERING PHiLiP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN The late Philip Seymour Hoffman, who died in February at the age of forty-six, was an actor of genius. In its obituary, the New...
Paid articleBottled-Up Yearning (March 2014)
FILM Richard Alleva Bottled-Up Yearning 'THE INVISIBLE WOMAN' & 'GLORIA' In the paperback copy of Great Expectations I read as a boy, the introduction informed me that Ellen "Nelly" Ternan was a...
Paid articleThe Art of the Con (February 2014)
FILM Richard Alleva The Art of the Con 'AMERICAN HUSTLE' & 'THE WOLF OF WALL STREET' We've all seen movies in which con men don disguises, but when Irving Rosenfeld, the fraudster-hero of David...
Paid articlePhilomena Saving Mr. Banks (January 2014)
FILM Richard Alleva Odd Couples 'PHILOMENA' & 'SAVING MR. BANKS' Philomena is the kind of movie that compels a reviewer to say what it isn't before trying to say what it is. That's because the...
Paid articleCaptain Phillips All Is Lost (December 2013)
FILM Richard Alleva All At Sea 'CAPTAIN PHILLIPS' & 'ALL IS LOST' Can a movie be both thoughtful and electrifyingly exciting? I think Captain Phillips is. Its omniscient camerawork makes you...
Paid article12 Years a Slave (December 2013)
FILM Richard Alleva An Everyday Nightmare '12 YEARS A SLAVE' The 1853 book Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup, a black freeman kidnapped and sold into slavery, retails so much cruelty,...
Paid articlePrisoners (October 2013)
FILM Richard Alleva Overstuffed 'PRISONERS' Prisoners is a thriller about the infectiousness of sin. Its very first shot evokes the end of innocence: Pennsylvania woods under new-fallen snow, a...
Paid articleFruitvale Station (September 2013)
FILM Recording Angel with a Camera Richard Alleva 'FRUITVALE STATION' In Oakland, California, during the early morning of January 1, 2009, Oscar Julius Grant, a twenty-two-year-old African...
Paid articleDeceptive Practice Now You see me (July 2013)
SCREEN Richard Alleva Misdirection 'DECEPTIVE PRACTICE' & 'NOW YOU SEE ME' Unlike those legendary magi— Faustus, Simon Magus, etc.— who claimed contact with the spirit world, modern magicians...
Paid articleThe Great Gatsby (June 2013)
SCREEN Richard Alleva Roaring Mad 'THE GREAT GATSBY' When I heard that Baz Luhrmann was filming The Great Gatsby, I gagged. Sure, the Australian director’s feature debut, Strictly Ballroom, was...
Paid articleSpring Breakers (May 2013)
SCREEN Richard Alleva Girls Gone Gangsta 'SPRING BREAKERS' Spring Breakers has attracted a fair amount of buzz, but it’s an uneasy buzz. The initial scenes—with the camera fixed on the boobs and...
Paid articleSilver Linings Playbook Side Effects (March 2013)
SCREEN Richard Alleva Pillheads ‘silver linings playbook’ & ‘side effects’ About fifteen minutes into Silver Linings Playbook, its hero, Pat Solitano—played by Bradley Cooper—is out jogging...
Paid articleDjango Unchained (March 2013)
SCREEN Richard Alleva Raw Spaghetti 'DJANGO UNCHAINED' The director Quentin Tarantino loves genre, the grungier the better. His first three films, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Jackie Brown,...
Paid articleArgo, Dark Zero Thirty (February 2013)
SCREEN Richard Alleva Hide & Seek 'ARGO' & 'ZERO DARK THIRTY' If you knew only the plots of Argo and Zero Dark Thirty, you might conclude that they are sibling movies. Both are based on actual...
Paid articleAnna Karenina, Les Misérables (January 2013)
Screen Richard Alleva Devices & Desires ‘anna karenina’ & ‘Les MisÉrables’ Leo Tolstoy hated theater, or at least the more stylized varieties of it. The author of some well-received plays...
Paid articleLincoln (December 2012)
SCREEN Richard Alleva The Closer 'LINCOLN' In the foreground of Steven Spielberg's Lincoln is the thrust and parry of politics—powerful men competing to control the conclusion and aftermath of...
Paid articleCloud Atlas (December 2012)
SCREEN Richard Alleva Thin Air 'CLOUD ATLAS' David Mitchell's virtuosic novel Cloud Atlas enfolds six plots into one theme: No man is an island but neither is any era. In all times, in all...
Paid articleThe Master (November 2012)
SCREEN Richard Alleva Hooch & Hokum 'THE MASTER' In one respect, Paul Thomas Anderson stands apart from even the best of living American directors: he is both a fabricator of spectacle and a...
Paid articleFever Dream (September 2012)
SCREEN Richard Alleva Fever Dream 'COSMOPOLIS' Dostoyevsky famously said all Russian literature emerged from under Gogol’s “Overcoat.” Most of Don DeLillo’s fiction seems delivered from a dingy...
Paid articleSummer Movies (September 2012)
SCREEN Richard Alleva superfluous 'THE AMAZING SPIDER MAN,' 'THE DARK KNIGHT RISES,' AND 'THE BOURNE LEGACY' This summer at the movies was the season of franchises. Spider-Man spun himself into...
Paid articleMoonrise Kingdom (July 2012)
SCREEN Richard Alleva Whimsical Gallantry 'MOONRiSE KINGDOM' Up to now, watching a Wes Anderson movie was like entering a playground and discovering that the sandbox, the teeter-totters, and all...
Paid articleWe Have a Pope (June 2012)
SCREEN Richard Alleva See Sick 'WE HAVE A POPE' Off, off, you lendings!" cries King Lear as he strips himself of the royal robes and reduces himself to the state of an "unaccommodated man,"...
Paid articleSentimentalized Barbarity (May 2012)
Sentimentalized Barbarity ‘the hunger games’ Richard Alleva When the f ilm adaptation of an immensely popular novel preserves those elements that made the book a success, it is bound to...
Paid articleDISHONOR CODES (April 2012)
Richard Alleva Dishonor Codes ‘A Separation’ Watching the superlative Iranian film A Separation, I was reminded of Bleak House, Dickens’s account of a dispute grinding through the wheels of...
Paid article2012 Academy Short Films (March 2012)
screen Richard Alleva Surprise Endings 2012 Academy short films Among the five live-action short films nominated for the 2012 Oscars, there is no masterpiece like last year’s Na Wewe from...
Paid articleCoriolanus (February 2012)
Richard Alleva Mama's Boy, Daddy's Girl 'CORIOLANUS' & 'THE IRON LADY' Coriolanus—that sublime numbskull, that Roman Achilles revealed as an Oedipal nut-job, that overgrown Boy Scout turned...
Paid articleTinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" (February 2012)
Richard Alleva Spooks 'TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY' & 'THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO' The gentleman approached the bookstore's salesclerk and asked, "Have you got that new book with my friend,...
Paid articleHugo My Week with Marilyn (January 2012)
Richard Alleva Screen Magic ‘hugo’ & ‘my week with marilyn’ To call a successful film director a movie magician is usually just hyperbolic cliché, but Georges Méliès (1861–1938) was literally...
Paid articleJ. Edgar; The Skin I Live In (December 2011)
SCREEN Richard Alleva Hide & Seek 'J. EDGAR' & 'THE SKIN I LIVE IN' The first thing to be said about J. Edgar, the biopic about the late FBI director, is that it is an unexpectedly forbearing,...
Paid articleThe Ides of March Moneyball (November 2011)
SCREEN Richard Alleva Students of the Game 'THE IDES OF MARCH' & 'MONEYBALL' Even critics who admired The Ides of March for its fast moving melodramatics and juicy acting complained about a...
Paid articleLeft Behind (November 2011)
Richard Alleva Left Behind ‘higher ground’ If, like myself, you are both a Catholic and a cultural snob and find it all too easy to sneer at Protestant fundamentalist sects that seem awash in...
Paid articleBrighton Rock (October 2011)
SCREEN Richard Alleva Good Melodrama ‘brighton rock’ Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock (1938) was published when the author was thirty-four but reads like the creation of a teenaged genius, a...
Paid articleThe Tree Of Life (August 2011)
SCREEN Richard Alleva Dappled Thing 'THE TREE OF LIFE' Terrence Malick is the most intuitive, the most blissed-out of American moviemakers. Let Martin Scorsese fixate on his gangsters and...
Paid articleMidnight In Paris: The Princess Of Montpensier (July 2011)
SCREEN Richard Alleva Another Country 'MIDNIGHT IN PARIS' & 'THE PRINCESS OF MONTPENSIER' I should have been the ideal viewer for Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, if its enthusiasts are right in...
Paid articleJane Eyre: Meek's Cutoff (June 2011)
SCREEN Richard Alleva Departures 'JANE EYRE' & 'MEEK'S CUTOFF' A friend coined a phrase to describe anything that is a cut above mediocrity but falls well short of excellence: "very OK." And...
Paid articleThe Conspirator (May 2011)
SCREEN Richard Alleva Channeling History 'THE CONSPIRATOR' If you're a fan of the History Channel, you'll feel right at home watching Robert Redford's recreation of Abraham Lincoln's murder near...
Paid articleOf Gods and Men (April 2011)
SCREEN Richard Alleva Birds on a Branch 'OF GODS AND MEN' As I watched Of Gods and Men, the mesmerizing fact-based French movie about the martyrdom of seven French Trappists in 1990s Algeria,...
Paid articleLive-Action Short Films (April 2011)
SCREEN Richard Alleva Small Wonders OSCAR-NOMINATED LIVE-ACTION SHORT FILMS When the Oscars are handed out each year for best picture, actors, etc., you have the dubious pleasure of comparing...
Paid articleThe Rite (March 2011)
SCREEN Richard Alleva Devil Dregs 'THE RITE' The Exorcist (1973) was geared to shock. With its pea-soup projectile vomiting, bestial soundtrack noises, revolving head, voice of Satan (Mercedes...
Paid articleTrue Grit (February 2011)
SCREEN Richard Alleva Calvinists Ride Again 'TRUE GRIT' As True Grit begins, the off-screen voice of its fourteen-year-old heroine, Mattie Ross, tells us that her father was murdered by his...
Paid articleBlack Swan, The Fighter, The King's Speech (January 2011)
SCREEN Richard Alleva Contenders 'BLACK SWAN,' 'THE FIGHTER,' & 'THE KING'S SPEECH' Reviewing Darren Aronofsky's ballet-melodrama Black Swan, some critics trotted out comparisons with The Red...
Paid articleNowhere Boy (December 2010)
SCREEN Richard Alleva A Bit Like You & Me 'NOWHERE BOY' & 'TAMARA DREWE' Driving home from a college class every Wednesday night in 1969, a friend and I would listen to his eight-track tape of...
Paid articleHereafter (November 2010)
SCREEN Richard Alleva Survivors 'HEREAFTER' To summarize the plot of Clint Eastwood's Hereafter is to falsify the experience of seeing the film. So I'll keep it brief. Marie (Cecile De France),...
Paid article29 Wall Street (October 2010)
SCREEN Richard Alleva Overachievers 'WALL STREET: MONEY NEVER SLEEPS' & 'THE SOCIAL NETWORK' Has there ever been a public crisis less accessible to the camera than the 2008 bursting of our...
Paid articleThe Last Exorcism Devil (October 2010)
SCREEN Richard Alleva In the Details 'THE LAST EXORCISM' & 'DEVIL' I don't go to demonic-possession movies expecting to encounter interesting characters, but The Last Exorcism has them, and...
Paid articleGet Low (September 2010)
SCREEN Richard Alleva Last Respects 'GET LOW' The bifurcation of the American movie industry into big-studio productions (superheroes, explosions, glossy chick-flicks, 3-D, animation, CGI,...
Paid articleWinter's Bone (August 2010)
SCREEN Richard Alleva Missing Fathers 'WINTER'S BONE' & 'THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT' In movies like Deliverance, The Hills Have Eyes, and Southern Hospitality, the heroes make a wrong turn and wind...
Paid articleThe Catholic Hitchcock (July 2010)
The Catholic Hitchcock A Director's Sense of Good & Evil Richard Alleva "I don't think I can be labeled a Catholic artist," the director Alfred Hitchcock told Francois Truffaut, "but it may be...
Paid articlePlease Give (June 2010)
Screen Richard Alleva Grand Illusions 'PLEASE GIVE' Dealing with a cold, you've probably taken one of those "time release" capsules that administer micropellets of antihistamine at intervals,...
Paid articleAjami (May 2010)
Screen Richard Alleva Clandestiny 'AJAMI' Social commentators lament the lonely individualism of Americans, and pinpoint the loss of community as a source of malaise. We detach ourselves all too...
Paid articleThe Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Kick-Ass (May 2010)
Screen Richard Alleva Off the Page 'THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO' & 'KICK-ASS' Millions of readers in Europe and the United States have bought and (presumably) read Stieg Larsson's...
Paid articleShutter Island The Ghost Writer (April 2010)
Screen Richard Alleva Twists, Turns & Bedlam 'SHUTTER ISLAND' & 'THE GHOST WRITER' The credits for Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island tell us that it's based on a Dennis Lehane novel. So it...
Paid articleThe Last Station (March 2010)
Richard Alleva A Russian Lear ‘THE lAST STATion’ To be a national hero even while advocating radical ideas that inflamed the young, antagonized the government, and tore...
Paid articleThe Lovely Bones A Single Man (February 2010)
Richard Alleva Restless Spirits ‘ThE lovEly bonES’ & ‘A SinGlE MAn’ “You took the best / Now take the rest,” the blues singer offers her lover in despair. But Peter Jackson,...
Paid articleAvatar (January 2010)
Screen Richard Alleva Pocahokum ‘AVATAR’ For more than a year TV and theater trailers have been promising that James Cameron’s Avatar would change the way we look at movies,...
Paid articleA Christmas Carol Precious (December 2009)
Screen Richard Alleva Transformers ‘A CHRISTMAS CAROL’ & ‘PRECIOUS’ Jim Carrey as Scrooge in A Christmas Carol done in 3-D and motion-capture animation? I bah-humbugged on the way...
Paid articleA Serious Man An Education (December 2009)
Screen Richard Alleva Building Characters ‘A SERIOUS MAN’ & ‘AN EDUCATION’ I think it was The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) that made me vow never again to see anything made by the Coen...
Paid articleThe Informant! (November 2009)
Screen Richard Alleva Not Quite Comedy ‘THE INFORMANT!’ The Informant! both gripped and frustrated me. This is Steven Soderbergh’s semifictional adaptation of Kurt Eichenwald’s...
Paid articleThe Hurt Locker (September 2009)
Screen Richard Alleva War As Narcotic ‘THE HURT LOCKER’ The online “Urban Dictionary” tells me that a “hurt locker” is (1) an unfamiliar place where you wake up after a night of...
Paid articlePublic Enemies (August 2009)
Screen Richard Alleva Sound & Fury ‘PUBLIC ENEMIES’ In what is probably his best work, Heat, director Michael Mann turned a typical copsandrobbers scenario into a war epic. The...
Paid articleTyson (June 2009)
Screen Richard Alleva Tempered Iron 'TYSON' Note to the reader: This review was written before the terrible accident that ended the life of Mike Tyson's young daughter. I'm letting the...
Paid articleEarth Star Trek (June 2009)
Screen Richard Alleva Not-So-New Frontiers 'EARTH' & 'STAR TREK' I remember Walt Disney's "True-Life Adventures" of the 1940s and '50s with little fondness. Indeed, The African...
Paid articleSin Nombre Duplicity (May 2009)
The more movie gangsters change, the more they stay the same. In the 1930s they were Irish (The Public Enemy) and Italian (Little Caesar, Paul Muni's Scarface). Since then, the hoods have...
Paid articleNow on DVD (April 2009)
A movie seems to take on a new life when it reappears on DVD. It gets re-reviewed, though only briefly, in little rectangular boxes in newspapers and entertainment magazines. Even the...
Paid articleThe Class Wendy and Lucy (March 2009)
However tyrannical the reign of superheroes and special effects over the box office, naturalism, even hypernaturalism, is not dead as a cinematic style. Witness two recent films. The...
Paid articleThe Reader (February 2009)
Screen Richard Alleva Summer Intern ‘the ReaDeR’ To say that Bernhard Schlink’s book The Reader is a love story that turns into a Holocaust novel may be glib, but it isn’t completely...
Paid articleDoubt (January 2009)
Commonweal . January 30, 2009 20 Screen Trick, No Treat Richard Alleva mains unseen (though not, finally, unknown). Sr. Aloysius’s sleuthing ferrets throughout the last centu- vinced...
Paid articleTwilight (December 2008)
Richard Alleva Blood Lust ‘TWIlIGHT’ Twilight interests me because it almost takes the “mass” out of “mass entertain­ ment.” Most film fran­ chises have their special target...
Paid articleHappy-Go-Lucky (December 2008)
No Reservations Richard Alleva Mike LeiGH’S ‘HAppy-Go-Lucky’ “An adventure is only an a car and must learn how to drive it, fury but conducts us through layers of inconvenience rightly Scott...
Paid articleReligulous Blindness (November 2008)
The People in Darkness Richard Alleva ‘RElIGulouS’ & ‘BlINdNESS’ So far this has been an excellent decade for village explainers, that tribe that eternally strives to get the rest of...
Paid articleI Served the King of England (October 2008)
Light as a Feather Richard Alleva ‘I SERVED THE KING OF ENGLAND’ once giving moviegoers genically approved young German sol- In his younger days the Czech Nazis, back to the brothel, which...
Paid articleElegy Vicky Cristina Barcelona (September 2008)
Some Like It Hot Richard Alleva ‘ELEgy’ & ‘vIcky crISTINA BArcELoNA’ David Kepesh, the hero of though both insist that their sex is just side Consuela. Patricia Clarkson, on the Elegy,...
Paid articleThe Dark Knight (September 2008)
All Grown Up Richard Alleva ‘ThE DARK KniGhT’ Before last summer the pub- and his scheme entails the elimination of lusted for money and women, relished the lic seemed indifferent to each of...
Paid articleSex and the City (July 2008)
Commonweal . July 18, 2008 0 new line cinema Screen Past Prime sexually exultant publicist had snared a Richard Alleva ‘sex and the City’ I loved the HBO series Sex and In all of the...
Paid articlePrince Caspian Indiana Jones (June 2008)
Screen Richard Alleva Young at Heart ‘PrinCe CaSPian’ & ‘inDiana joneS anD THe kinGDoM of THe CrYSTal SkUll’ Allofusrecreateinourmemo riesthebookswe’veread,but children do...
Paid articleIron Man Redbelt (June 2008)
Richard Alleva Suiting Up ‘iron MAn’ & ‘rEdBElt’ I can’t write a fair review of Iron Man because the Spider-Man trilo­ gy has ruined the su­ perhero genre for me. Though Tim...
Paid articleMarried Life 21 (May 2008)
Richard Alleva Confused Sympathies ‘MaRRieD LiFe’ & ‘21’ Farce is the first cousin of melodrama. Both employ the same devices: people enter­ing rooms at precisely the wrong moment and...
Paid articleThe Counterfeiters (April 2008)
Richard Alleva Behind Enemy Lines ‘ThE COUNTERFEITERS’ The opening scenes of the Oscar-winning Austrian film The Counterfeiters take us to Monte Carlo right after World War II....
Paid article4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (March 2008)
Richard Alleva Catastrophe Looms ‘4 MoNTHS, 3 wEEkS AND 2 DAYS’ The superb Romanian film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days uses the subject of abortion the way Brokeback Mountain dealt...
Paid articleThe Diving Bell and the Butterfly (February 2008)
Richard Alleva Locked In ‘THE DiviNG BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY’ While watching The Diving Bell and the Butterfly it came home to me more clearly than ever that literature strains...
Paid articleThere Will Be Blood (February 2008)
Richard Alleva Thicker than Oil ‘THERE WiLL BE BLooD’ Why is it that the great char acters of fiction and drama always, finally, elude us? Hamlet, Phaedra, Charles Foster Kane,...
Paid articleI'm Not There The Golden Compass (January 2008)
Richard Alleva Fractured ‘I’M NOT THERE’ & ‘THE GOLDEN COMPASS’ Some novelists, playwrights, and filmmakers (Shaw, Voltaire, Jean-Luc Godard) work closer to the vein of the...
Paid articleNo Country for Old Men (December 2007)
Screen The Haunting Richard Alleva ‘NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN’ Sometimes the real auteur of a movie is the author of the novel it’s based on. For instance, John Huston’s triumphant 1941...
Paid articleLust, Caution (November 2007)
Screen Screen Richard Alleva Hope Abandoned ANG LEE’S ‘LUST, CAUTION’ Beautiful. Suspenseful. Sensu al. Psychologically acute. All these words apply to Lust, Caution....
Paid articleMichael Clayton (November 2007)
Screen Michael Clayton begins with its eponymous hero (played by George Clooney) summoned from a midnight card game by a colleague in Clayton’s law firm. A millionaire client has fled...
Paid articleThe Brave One (October 2007)
Commonweal . October 12, 2007 26 Screen Gun Therapy Richard Alleva ‘THE BRAVE ONE’ Plato wanted poets and dramatists banished from his republic because he believed they reveled in...
Paid article3:10 to Yuma (September 2007)
Overcrowded Richard Alleva ‘3:10 TO YUMA’ James Mangold has remade the 1957 semiclassic Western, 3:10 to Yuma, in the same way that Martin Scorsese remade Cape Fear. In both cases, a...
Paid articleA Mighty Heart (August 2007)
Screen All Too Real Richard Alleva ‘A MIGHTY HEART’ A Mighty Heart is a work of pathos, with politics simmering in the background and occasionally thrusting itself into the...
Paid articleONCE & LA VIE EN ROSE (July 2007)
Richard Alleva Behind the Music 'ONCE' & "LA VIE EN ROSE' Boy meets girl in the streets of Dublin. Both are aspiring musicians. She's Czech and estranged from her husband. He's Irish and...
Paid articleAway from Her (June 2007)
22 Richard Alleva Cheating To Be Faithful 'AWAY FROM HER' Above the entrance of every theater showing Away from: 17: Her, there should be a sign . that reads, "Abandon all , ( ~ f...
Paid articleThe 300 (May 2007)
Richard Alleva Bogs of War 'THE 300' Though The 300 was adapted from a Frank Miller graphic novel rather than from the histories of Herodotus or Plutarch, the Miller version (which I...
Paid articleThe Namesake (May 2007)
Richard Alleva Identity Crisis MIRA NAIR'S "THE NAMESAKE" ~ The Namesake, Mira Nair's film of Jhumpa Lahiri's novel, takes globalization--for most of us no more than a concept dealt with in...
Paid articleBreach/The Lives of Others (April 2007)
,g o Richard Alleva Under the Mask 'BREACH" & 'THE LIVES OF OTHERS' In Breach, playing the traitor Robert Hanssen, Chris Cooper looks and behaves like all of Graham Greene's tormented...
Paid articleAmazing Grace (March 2007)
Screen Richard Alleva The Other Abolitionists "AMAZING GRACE' For American moviegoers, Amazing Grace fills an amazing gap in popular knowledge. We may leave the theater wondering why...
Paid articleLetters from Iwo Jima/Pan's Labyrinth (February 2007)
t-q o o Richard Alleva The Other Side 'LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA' & 'PAN'S LABYRINTH' :4:! For Letters from Iwo Jima, Clint Eastwood used the same cinematographer, Tom Stem, who shot the...
Paid articleLittle Children (February 2007)
Screen Richard Alleva Inscrutable "LITTLE CHILDREN' Early in Little Children, Todd Field's adaptation of Tom Perrotta's novel, Sarah (Kate Winslet) is in the park with her little girl, along...
Paid articleApocalypto/The Nativity Story (January 2007)
q~ q~ e,t b. Richard AUeva Back to Basics 'APOCALYPTO" & "THE NATIVITY STORY" ~ Mel Gibson needs pain. You : .... ~::.. might retort that, lately, he's made more than enough for himself,...
Paid articleBorat/The Queen (December 2006)
Screen Richard Alleva British Invasion "BORAT" & 'THE QUEEN' "Smile," Alan Funt used to say on his TV show, "you're on Candid Camera." "Gotcha!" Sacha Baron Cohen might say, "you're in my...
Paid articleFlags of Our Fathers (November 2006)
Screen q2~ t',l o o 0 Richard Alleva A Heroic Effort CLINT EASTWOOD'S 'FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS' t's easy to see why Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers has been hailed as a...
Paid articleThe Departed (November 2006)
Richard Alleva Boston Massacre 'THE DEPARTED' feel like an ingrate about The Departed, Martin Scorsese's latest. Scripted by William Monahan, this is a cops-androbbers melodrama that...
Paid article'HOLLYWOODLAND" & 'THE BLACK DAHLIA' (October 2006)
L.A. Stories RichardAlleva 'HOLLYWOODLAND" & 'THE BLACK DAHLIA' Even if you've never hung around actors, you've prob- ' ' ii~:~ ably known somebody like ~-~.-.~: :i ~ ~ : ~ George...
Paid articleWorld Trade Center (September 2006)
Screen Passion Play by talking to Jimeno, by joking, cajol- ing, and scolding his brother officer. As time passes, the more deeply buried McLoughlin begins to pass out, and so it becomes...
Paid articleWordplay/A Prairie Home Companion (August 2006)
Richard Alleva Nerd Heaven 'WORDPLAY' & 'A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION' Something odd happened in film theaters this summer: National Public Radio went to the movies. Or, at any rate, some of its...
Paid articleThe Da Vinci Code (June 2006)
Screen Richard A lleva Puzzle Solved 'THE DA VINCI CODE' On my way to The Da Vinci Code I felt as bully as Teddy Roosevelt. The time was noon, the sky was promising, springtime buoyed me. Well...
Paid articleFateless (May 2006)
eq O of comfort while resting in an infirmary. This pinpoint use of color may remind us of the moment in Schindler's List when the hero spots a little girl in a red coat fleeing the...
Paid articleTsotsi (April 2006)
Screen Richard A lleva Mean Streets GAVIN HOOD'S 'TSOTSI' Tsotsi, the latest winner of the foreign-language-film Oscar (the language being a Soweto street argot called Tsotsi-taal, which...
Paid articleThe Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (March 2006)
Screen Richard Alleva Displaced Person "THE THREE BURIALS OF MELQUIADES ESTRADA' The Tex-Mex Western The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, written by Guillermo Arriaga and directed...
Paid articleMunich Sophie Scholl: The Final Days (March 2006)
Screen Richard Alleva Making History "MUNICH' & "SOPHIE SCHOLL: THE FINAL DAYS' ~vlunich warrants controversy but not the controversy it got. Political columnists accused the Steven...
Paid articleBrokeback Mountain (February 2006)
This page is missing STATEMENT OF PURPOSE Fellowship o f Reconciliation Members: The Fellowship of Reconciliation is composed of women and men who recognize the essential unity of all creation...
Paid articleThe Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (January 2006)
Screen Richard Alleva No Tame Lion 'THE LION, THE WITCH, AND THE WARDROBE' All my seven Narnian books . . . began with seeing pictures in my head. At first they were not a story, just...
Paid articlePride and Prejudice & Shopgirl (December 2005)
Screen re3 t'4 .g 0 0 Richard Alleva Two to Tango 'PRIDE AND PREJUDICE' & 'SHOPGIRL" "I loathe you!" "And I despise you!" Pause. Kiss. That's the heartbeat (or love/hatebeat) of Pr/de...
Paid articleGood Night, and Good Luck North Country (November 2005)
c,t ~8 2~ i 0 RichardAlleva Civil Courage 'GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK' & 'NORTH COUNTRY' Arrow shirts, furrowed brows, steely replies, and the Hemingway ethos of coolnessunder-fire...
Paid articleA History of Violence (October 2005)
Screen Richard Alleva Public Enemy 'A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE" ~ Just my luck. I'm trying to come to grips with the most : ~ : : .~_~ unsettling American film ..... produced in several years, : ....
Paid articleBroken Flowers/March of the Penguins (September 2005)
Richard Alleva No Easy Gait 'BROKEN FLOWERS' & 'MARCH OF THE PENGUINS" Bill Murray was the first movie comedian since W. C. Fields to make cold contempt hip and attractive. For both...
Paid articleWar of the Worlds / Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (August 2005)
Richard Alleva Strange Invaders "WAR OF THE WORLDS" & "CHARLIE & THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY" 2 -< O 30 H. G. Wells was a Darwinian but he wasn't smug about it. His novel War of the...
Paid articleThe Ninth Day (June 2005)
Screen Richard Alleva Tempted by the Devil "THE NINTH DAY' The ticking-time-bomb movie genre must be nearly as old as moviemaking itself. It lends itself to all manner of variation, but...
Paid articleCrash & Kingdom of Heaven (June 2005)
wScreen c-q 0 o ~a 26 Richard Alleva Skin Deep "CRASH' & "KINGDOM OF HEAVEN" Though the executives of movie studios need to make tons of money to keep their jobs, they also want to hang...
Paid articleOur Fathers (May 2005)
Media Richard Alleva Scarlet's Web 'OUR FATHERS' ON SHOWTIME ~Our premiering on Fathers, the Showtime channel Saturday, May 21, dramatizes the Archdiocese of Boston--s sexualabuse...
Paid articleSin City & Walk on Water (May 2005)
Richard Alleva Blood Sport "SIN CITY" & "WALK ON WATER" and thus expands the cinematographer's spectrum. For instance, when the lonely brute played by Rourke mourns the murdered dame on his...
Paid articleThe Merchant of Venice Downfall (April 2005)
0 ic Richard Alleva Settling Accounts 'THE MERCHANT OF VENICE' & 'DOWNFALL' The Merchant of Venice is a fascinating headache of a play and didn't Shakespeare intend it so? He clangs...
Paid articleThe Films of Carl Dreyer (March 2005)
Richard Alleva Corruption & Transcendence THE FILMS OF CARL DREYER We all know which movies to watch for Christmas, but what about Easter? Are you really satisfied with all those films about...
Paid articleCatching Light (February 2005)
Richard Alleva Slipping on the Orange Peel ,q r O O r Catching Light Looking for God in the Movies Roy M. Anker Eerdmans, $20, 432 pp, I have to work hard to be fair to this book because...
Paid articleThe Aviator (February 2005)
Richard Alleva It's Cold Up There 'THE AVIATOR' Martin Scorsese's first film, Who's That Knocking at My Door?, proclaimed what he wanted no, what he had~ to do with his magnificent talent:...
Paid articleRay Kinsey (January 2005)
~a Richard Alleva Sex, Drugs & R&B "RAY' & 'KINSEY' Call an entertainer's work "conventional" nowadays and you might receive a gob of spit in your eye. Yet here comes Ray, a biopic about...
Paid articleTeam America The Incredibles (December 2004)
SCREEN Richard Alleva ALTER EGOS 'Team America' & 'The Incredibles' Team America: World Police is the all-marionette satire of our current administration's penchant for unprovoked invasion. Its...
Paid articleThe Motorcycle Diaries (November 2004)
SCREEN Richard Alleva EASY RIDERS 'The Motorcycle Diaries' The Motorcycle Diaries is about a sensitive, intelligent, and doomed youth named Ernesto Guevara, and the movie itself is sensitive,...
Paid articleBright Young Things (October 2004)
Richard Alleva NOT *VILE' ENOUGH 'Bright Young Things' There are plenty of Noel Coward songs, performed by the composer, on the soundtrack of Bright Young Things. And why not? This film, written...
Paid articleHero Vanity Fair (September 2004)
Richard Alleva MYTHMAKIN` 'Hero' & 'Vanity Fair' he Chinese movie epic, Hero, is more than spectacular; it is elemental. Watching it, I felt regret that Wolfgang Petersen had landed the job...
Paid articleThe Manchurian Candidate (September 2004)
Richard Alleva BRAIN DRAIN 'The Manchurian Candidate' ithout tampering with the bones of its narrative, Jonathan Demme has transformed The Manchurian Candidate, turning the classic cold-war pulp...
Paid articleThe Terminal (July 2004)
PATRIOT ACTS `The Terminal' ARMCHAIR THEOLOGIANS SERIES LUTHER For Armchair Theologians SCREEN Richard Alleva I n Steven Spielberg's latest, The Terminal, Viktor Navorski (Tom Hanks), a...
Paid articleTroy (June 2004)
SCREEN trictly speaking, Troy isn't an adaptation of The Iliad. The closing credits of Wolfgang Petersen's production tell us that David Benioff's screenplay was "inspired" by Homer's...
Paid articleGoodbye Lenin! Kill Bill-Volume 2 (May 2004)
Richard Alleva EAST MEETS WESf 'Goodbye, Lenin!' & 'Kill Bill-Volume 2' Round about 1991, as the Soviet Union imploded, Roger Rosenblatt did a television essay for the Mc-Neil/Lehrer NewsHour in...
Paid articleDogville (April 2004)
airless, horizonless, sunless, moonless, treeless setting lets us know that the characters on screen are not poetic distillations of people but mere enactors of the one and only quality that von...
Paid articleThe Passion of the Christ (March 2004)
Richard Alleva TORTUROUS Mel Gihson's 'The Passion of the Christ' im hile attending Mass as a child, I used to wonder why it was necessary to change the wine into blood. After all, the...
Paid articleFinal cut (February 2004)
Thinking about death: Part 2 FINAL CUT Hollywood does the afterlife Richard Alleva hether heavenly or hellish, the afterlife presents moviemakers with one big headache: eternity. Drama demands...
Paid articleThe Lord of the Rings' Trilogy (January 2004)
SCREEN Richard Alleva PETER JACKSON'S SORCERY 'The Lord of the Rings' Trilogy eter Jackson's three-part film of The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) may or may not please votaries of J. R....
Paid articleMaster and Commander (December 2003)
SCREEN Richard Alleva SWEPT AWAY Peter Weir's 'Master and Commander' That war is hell must always be a profounder fact than war is romance; nevertheless, war goes on being romance. Combine this...
Paid articleKill Bill-Volume I Lost in Translation Looking west from California's shores (December 2003)
SCREEN Richard Alleva ABOUT A BOY 'Kill Bill Volume 1,' & 'Lost in Translation' Hill Bill Volume 1 has brought Quentin Tarantino his usual reviews: the man is a genius, the man is a...
Paid articleThe Magdalene Sisters (October 2003)
Richard Alleva SCREEN HEART OF DARKNESS 'The Magdalene Sisters' Anger can fuel art. Goya's series Disasters of War seem to cry out from their prints with the artisf s rage at what Napoleon's...
Paid articleRobert Bresson by Joseph Cunneen (September 2003)
BOOKS Enduringly strange Robert Bresson A Spiritual Style in Film Joseph Cunneen Continuum, $29.95,199 pp. Richard Alleva A consumptive priest drags himself down a country road and the...
Paid articleA lion, even in winter (September 2003)
Richard Alleva SCREEN A LION, EVEN IN WINTER Remembering Katharine Hepburn The death of Katharine Houghton Hepburn on Sunday, June 29, was big news everywhere, but in my part of the country-the...
Paid articleHoles Raising Victor Vargas (June 2003)
SCREEN Richard Alleva DIG IN 'Holes' & 'Raising Victor Vargas' Once in a great while, the Newbery Medal actually goes to the best children's book of the year rather than a pale compromise (that...
Paid articleLaurel Canyon Bend It Like Beckham (May 2003)
SCREEN Richard Alleva GAMES PEOPLE PLAY 'Laurel Canyon' & "Bend It Like Beckham' What's the best way of re-belling against your par-ents when they happen to belong to a minority? By joining the...
Paid articleChicago (March 2003)
Richard Alleva 'Chicago's' expert sleaze Chicago begins oddly (oddly for a movie musical) with a close-up of a woman's eyes. Hungry eyes. Envious eyes. The camera moves closer and closer as if it...
Paid articleKeeping up with the Simses (February 2003)
KEEPING UP WITH THE SIMSES , From Monopoly to cyberspace Prior to the Christmas season of 1934, board and card games had two great glories: they injected a little artificial drama into ordinary...
Paid articleThe godfather (December 2002)
CULTURE WATCH Richard Alleva THE GODFATHER The kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara-the play A few drops of water sprinkled on a child's feverish forehead and the words of baptism secretly muttered by...
Paid articleChildren's books All hail Philippa Pearce! (November 2002)
CHILDREN'S BOOKS Lions, dinosaurs, & Jules Feiffer Richard Alleva If the Washington Square/ Greenwich Village scene of the late 1950s and early 1960s-folksingers and coffeehouses and leotards,...
Paid articleMixing it up What 'Moby-Dick' & jazz have in common (September 2002)
Richard Alleva MIXING IT UP Richard Rodriguez on 'Brown' CULTURE WATCH If you go to a bookstore to buy Richard Rodriguez's Brown: The Last Discovery of America (Viking; see review, page 30), you...
Paid articleComic erudution The 'Introducing' series (July 2002)
CULTURE WATCH Richard Alleva COMIC ERUDITION R. Crumb meets Kafka March 2002 was the tenth an-niversary of a smart and smart-alecky publishing venture called the Introducing series. Longtime...
Paid articleToward a 'catholic' theater Catholic University's theatrical giant (June 2002)
Richard Alleva TOWARD A 'CATHOLIC' THEATER The legacy of Gilbert Hartke Once upon a recent time, there was a man with four hungers who befriended and benefited a multitude while appeasing those...
Paid articleTrue confessions What Caesar & the Rat Pack have in common (May 2002)
Richard Alleva TRUE CONFESSIONS Fifteen years of 'Biography' The A&E television series "Biography," now in its fifteenth year, has become a many-tentacled phenomenon. There are Biography magazine, a...
Paid articleKids' vids With a watchful eye... (March 2002)
CULTURE WATCH Richard Alleva KIDS' VIDS To be seen & heard I cannot decide whether young children are gainers or losers now that they have been ghettoized by popular culture. When so much of TV...
Paid articleMissing the dark side Ken Burns's 'Mark Twain' (February 2002)
Richard Alleva MISSING THE DARK SIDE Ken Burns does 'Mark Twain' Whether it deals with the Civil War, baseball, or jazz, a Ken Burns documentary always takes us into the world of Ken Burns. In...
Paid articleA major minor poet (January 2002)
Richard Alleva CULTURE WATCH A MAJOR MINOR POET Billy Collins isn't just funny Billy Collins being named poet laureate was good news to me, yet I think the first words that ran through my head,...
Paid articleA&E gets a face-lift (December 2001)
CULTURE WATCH Richard Alleva A&E GETS A FACE-LIFT Stark reality slicked up TV programming needs a face. I don't mean merely the face of the host or star of a particular series, but the way...
Paid articleTV in a time of terror: Watching the tube with September 11 in mind (November 2001)
CULTURE WATCH Richard Alleva TV IN A TINE OF TERROR The channels are changing It was a hinge event. A door has been closed, a lock snapped shut. Everything taking place in this...
Paid articleHow sick can we get?: A different kind of air pollution (July 2001)
CULTURE WATCH Richard Alleva HOW SICK CAN WE GET? Very In Paris, on December 11,1896, William Butler Yeats attended the opening night of a play. Years later, he wrote about the event in...
Paid articleThe rap on 'rap': Why hasn't rap lodged itself in our collective consciousness? (June 2001)
CULTURE WATCH Richard Alleva THE RAP ON 'RAP' Yo, where's the melody? In his article, "Yo Comma Dog" {New Yorker, March 12), about the illegal gun possession trial of Sean "Puffy" Combs,...
Paid articlePlanned obsolescence: Now appearing in a repertory theater near you (May 2001)
CULTURE WATCH Richard Alleva PLANHED OBSOLESCENCE Movie stars on a stage near you If you live in a fair-sized city or near one, you will soon be receiving an eye-catching and idealistic...
Paid articleAnd the Oscar goes to...: How Hollywood rewards its own (April 2001)
CULTURE WATCH Richard Alleva AND THE OSCAR GOES TO... A brief history of the statuette In the 1960s and 1970s, shortly after Oscar night, the tonier movie critics such as John Simon would...
Paid articleI read the book (March 2001)
To St. Peter (After Herbert) The cock crowed as you denied all and let them all deride Him while you fled to hide. You abode still in your lie as they spiked Him to a tree stripped and...
Paid articleStop the presses (February 2001)
Richard Alleva STOP THE PRESSES Start your own Afew centuries ago, most important writers were strictly local heroes. The future pillars of Western art and sensibility were guys...
Paid articleBeam me up: A surprising bestseller (January 2001)
Medium When she'd outgrown a Medium, my daughter gave me a red ski sweater, strewn with snow in knitted flakes. It's thick—wool—but the sweater's extra warmth (despite the chilly rows of...
Paid articleQuadrants & quality (December 2000)
CULTURE WAT degradation. Sullivan would...
Paid articleOn screen, Bill's better self (November 2000)
mensional world we breathe in but only CULTURE...
Paid articleCheaper than crack (October 2000)
who was right or wrong in the business CULTURE...
Paid articleEnd of the affair (April 2000)
work of art. Crackling...
Paid articleCradle Will Rock Topsy-Turvy SCREEN (March 2000)
' Saint John's Richard...
Paid articleThe Green Mile (February 2000)
he's gained some weight and...
Paid articleThe Talented Mr. Ripley (February 2000)
We are becoming fluid and many-sided. Without quite realizing it, we have been evolving a sense of self appropriate to the restlessness and flux of our time. This mode of being...enables us to...
Paid articleThe End of the Affair (January 2000)
r GRAHAM GREENE LITE The End of the Affair ...~. aurice Bendrix, the hero of Graham Greene's The End of the Affair, is one of modern literature's great soreheads. This London novelist is so...
Paid articleThe Insider (January 2000)
~ ere's a scenario for you. A patriotic American discovers that a mighty and paranoid superpower is trying to undermine the health of this country, even to the point of turning many of us into...
Paid articleThe Messenger Dogma (December 1999)
he nuns at school had told me Shakespeare was great and so, twelve years old, I tuned in public television to watch the BBC's An Age of Kings, Shakespeare's English history plays done in...
Paid articleA CRITIC'S MANIFESTO (November 1999)
SCREEN Richard Alleva A CRITIC'S MANIFESTO Why I saw it, why I didn't T V programs such as "Enter tainment Tonight" offer to take you "behind the scenes" and show you how a movie is shot. For...
Paid articleAMERICAN BEAUTY (November 1999)
MEDIA Celia Wren HONE OF THE WALDORF SALAD PBS's 'New York' N ew York City is so inso- lently immediate, so whet- ted by the present, that it ¦¦Dm is nearly impossible, at least for...
Paid articleTHE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT THE SIXTH SENSE: There's nothing more edifying than a good scare. (September 1999)
SCREEN Richard Alleva SPOOKY, REALLY SPOOKY 'The Blair Witch Project' & 'The Sixth Sense' It was supposed to be the summer of The Phantom Menace and Eyes Wide Shut. Instead, two horror...
Paid articleEYES WIDE SHUT (September 1999)
SCREEN Richard Alleva FINAL CURTAIN Kubrick's 'Eyes Wide Shut' Not every great artist brings his career to a splendid dose. How could they, when few know they're on the way out? (Even the...
Paid articleAN IDEAL HUSBAND (August 1999)
SCREEN Richard Alleva WILDE FUN 'An Ideal Husband' Hscar Wilde's play, An Ideal Husband, premiered after his earlier successes, Lady Windermere's Fan and A Woman of No Importance—slick melodramas...
Paid articleSTAR WARS: THE PHANTOM MENACE (July 1999)
SCREEN Richard Alleva NOT CRAP, NOT GREAT 'Star Wars: Episode I, The Phantom Menace' Star Wars: The Phantom Menace arrived after six months of unprecedented ballyhoo that prompted hundreds...
Paid articleA MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM: Of fairy folk, boaters, corsets & Kevin Kline. (June 1999)
S C R EEN Richard Alleva REWORKING SHAKESPEARE 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' Judged by the film he has made from it, two elements of A Midsummer Night's Dream seem to have fascinated the director...
Paid articleThe Red Violin Election (June 1999)
SCREEN Richard Alleva VIRTUOSI 'The Red Violin' & 'Election When is a violin more than a violin? All the time, answer scriptwriter Don McKellar and director Francois Gi-rard, the creators of the...
Paid articleLOCK, STOCK AND TWO SMOKING BARRELS . GO . THE MATRIX (May 1999)
Richard Alleva COMIC NIHILISM 'Lock, Stock & Barrels,' 'Go,' 'Matrix' Charles Dickens is alive and well and working as a casting director in the East End of London. Well, not really, but it...
Paid articleSTANLEY KUBRICK (April 1999)
SCREEN Richard Alleva STANLEY KUBRICK 1928-99 Ibet Stanley Kubrick never had a nightmare while shooting a movie. Oh, I'm sure he had budgetary and logistic nightmares as any filmmaker must,...
Paid articleLIFE IS BEAUTIFUL (March 1999)
SCREEN Richard Alleva NOTHING TO LAUGH ABOUT Life Is Beautiful' Hife Is Beautiful, co-written and directed by Roberto Benigni, is now the highest-grossing foreign film in U.S. history. Favorable...
Paid articleTHE THIN RED LINE (March 1999)
SCREEN Richard Allev a GOD'S SARCASM 'The Thin Red Line' Home writer was once described as being long on genius but short on talent. Terence Malick, who wrote and directed The Thin Red...
Paid articleHILARY AND JACKIE SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE: The creative impluse at work from sibling rivalry to romantic love (February 1999)
SCREEN Richard Alleva LOVE'S LABOR 'Hilary & Jackie' & 'Shakespeare in Love' Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— / took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the...
Paid articlePSYCHO-YOU'VE GOT MAIL-PRINCE OF EGYPT (January 1999)
SCREEN Richard Alleva RENOVATIONS 'Psycho,' 'You've Got Mail' & 'Prince of Egypt' Hus Van Sant has not only filmed Joseph Stefano's script of Hitchcock's Psycho without rewriting it,...
Paid articleHappiness (December 1998)
president, this involvement is emblematic of the type of education the college is developing: "We link students to collaborative community work where they can experience their own potential...
Paid articleBeloved (November 1998)
o judge the film Beloved as a self-suffident work of art is impossible. Even someone who hasn't read the Toni Morrison novel may sense that what's on screen is misshaped, that important...
Paid articleAffliction (November 1998)
he artistic strengths of Affliction, Paul Schrader's soon-to-be-released adaptation of the novel by Russell Banks, are apparent before the film is five minutes underway. Its flaws take a...
Paid articleA Soldier's Daughter Never Cries One True Thing (October 1998)
s I watched the Ivory-Merchant adaptation of Kaylie Jones's novel, A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries, I gradually realized that it was a whitewash job. That my realization came late is a...
Paid articleSaving Private Ryan (September 1998)
f you've read anything at all I about Saving Private Ryan, you've read about its violence. Yes, it is appalling. But most screen violence nowadays is appalling, and if Steven Spielberg's...
Paid articleThe Truman Show The X-Files (August 1998)
he Truman Show is an ingenious toy of a movie, and it's not the fault of its director, Peter Weir, or its writer, Andrew Niccol, that the word "profound" has been attached to their...
Paid articleWilde (July 1998)
he very first scene of Wilde promises us that scriptwriter Julian Mitchell and director Brian Gilbert don't intend to coast on the fact that their hero's life was filled with glittering and...
Paid articleBulworth (June 1998)
s I write this, Warren Beatty's Bulworth is receiving rave reviews praising its star-writer-director for his courage in telling shocking political truths to his audience. In fact, just as...
Paid articleButcher Boy & Les Miserables (June 1998)
et me do Neil Jordan's interesting new movie The Butcher Boy a terrible injustice by telling you what's in it. Drunkenness. Suicide. Vandalization of a house by defecation. Madness....
Paid articlePrimary Colors (April 1998)
found Joe Klein's political roman a clef, Primary Colors, to be mostly a clef and quite insubstantial as roman. Once you got through the first fifty pages and aligned each fictional personage...
Paid articleTwilight: The Big Lebowski (April 1998)
~ obert Benton's Twil~@t gives us a new subgenre: geriatric fihn noir. Hoary plot maneuvers, leisurely pacing, mellow photography (sunset pinks dominate), a cast of magnificently aging...
Paid articleKundun (February 1998)
hat is it about Buddhism that elicits the child in sophisticated European and American directors? The reverence toward every living thing? The reliance on anecdote and legends to teach...
Paid articleAmistad Titanic (February 1998)
mastery with their powers of improvisation (resourcefulness!) to create art on the spot. Jazz, simply put, was black resourcefulness set to music: both the product of and a metaphor for the...
Paid articleThe Apostle (January 1998)
of wisdom, so are Catholic biblical scholars freed to engage Scripture in a variety of imaginative ways as a source of transforming wisdom. Jewish scholars would not, I think, admit the...
Paid articleWings of the Dove A movie that puts what's best of Henry James up on the screen; or so says our movie critic (December 1997)
Richard Alleva HENRY JAMES MADE CARNAL 'Wings of the Dove The final fictions of Henry James are royal works of art, but royalty can be exasperating. My loving quarrel with The Wings of the Dove,...
Paid articleBoogie Nights The Ice Storm Remember the '70s? Two moviemakers do in exploring the squalor of the pornographic movie business and the moral aridity of suburban life (December 1997)
SCREEN Richard Alleva FRIGID SEX 'Boogie Nights' and 'The Ice Storm' The best thing about Boogie Nights, a lengthy and panoramic view of the porn film industry in the late 1970s and early '80s,...
Paid articleL A Confidential Director Curtis Hanson brings off one memorable moment after another (October 1997)
Richard Alleva CITY OF ANGELS 'LA. Confidential' The movies have made us familiar with the good-bad cop. In fact, by now he is almost as much a stereotype as the strictly honorable detective or...
Paid articleIn the Company of lien The Game Men playing boys' games (October 1997)
SCREEN Richard Alleva JUST BUSINESS 'In the Company of Men' & 'The Game Near the conclusion of Neil LaBute' s debut feature film, In the Company of Men, a woman, in tears and rage, slaps a man...
Paid articleCop Land (September 1997)
Richard Alleva OFF DUTY 'Coil Laud' hen a melodrama really Wworks, no one, not even a critic, sits around grousing about its lack of psycholo gy, sociology, or sentiment. Who would trade the...
Paid articleUlee's Gold; Mrs Brown (September 1997)
Richard Alleva MELODRAMAS THAT WORK H ow nonviolent and unlurid can a melodrama be and yet remain a melodrama? Ulee's Gold, written and directed by Victor Nunez, provides a test case....
Paid articleFace/Off A case of interchangeable physiognomies from an action film expert (August 1997)
Richard Alleva MASKED MEN Woo's 'Face/Off Face/Off is a feast for the sens-es that often turns into an as-sault on the senses and that always asks us to disbelieve our senses. On one level, this...
Paid articleCitizen Ruth Can the abortion conflict be entertainingly satirized? From gun-toting, born-again prolifers to lesbian pro-chokers, Citizen Ruth is a surprisingly effective spoof (July 1997)
'Citizen Ruth' Richard Alleva SATIRE AIN'T FAIR Citizen Ruth, released last month on video and laser disk, does what any gen-uine satire must do: It of-fends our sensibilities for the sake of...
Paid articleParadise Road Night Falls on Manhattan A prisoner-of-war drama shows Australian director Bruce Beresford at the top of his form Sidney Lumet, with yet another New York City thriller, reveals signs of fatigue (June 1997)
Richard Alleva DIRECTORS AS WRITERS Beresford's 'Road' & Lumet's 'Night' the women (Glenn Close) intercepts her by saying, "Don't be absurd." Obviously Close could have uttered something like,...
Paid articleSling Blade Not just another rave review (May 1997)
Richard Alleva SHORT CUT TO CATHARSIS Thornton's 'Sling Blade' My review of Sling Blade is late because at first it didn't seem worthwhile review-ing an unresisting imbecility. But the movie has...
Paid articleCrash An obscene little automotive romp (April 1997)
SCREEN Richard Alleva RECKLESS Cronenberg's 'Crash' The recent successful revival of the Star Wars trilogy reminds us that the current split in American moviemaking began in 1977 when the first...
Paid articleHamlet Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet will flatten you in several different and not entirely unpleasant ways (March 1997)
Richard Alleva A SIXTEEN-WHEELER Branagh's 'Hamlet' Have you ever been run over by a truck and enjoyed the experience? Well... have you seen Kenneth Branagh's version of Hamlet? Hamlet is a...
Paid articleThe Portrait of a Lady (February 1997)
SCREEN Richard Alleva HENRY & JANE Campion's 'The Portrait of a Lady' With her film version of The Portrait ofa Lady, Jane Cam-pion doesn't just adapt Hen-ry James. She refutes him. But it's a...
Paid articleSome Mother's Son (February 1997)
Richard Alleva CHARACTER AMID CHAOS 'Some Mother's Son' Home Mother's Son, the latest movie about the everlasting Irish troubles, manages a singular feat of equipoise. It is both angry and human,...
Paid articleTwelfth Night The English Patient (December 1996)
Richard Alleva ROMANCE OLD & NEW 'Twelfth Night' & 'English Patient' Humankind cannot bear very much reality, wrote T. S. Eliot. Well, neither can Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, which thrives on...
Paid articleLooking for Richard Romeo & Juliet (December 1996)
SCREEN Richard Alleva THE BARD IN AMERICA 'Looking for Richard' & 'Romeo' Having performed Richard III on and off between movie assignments for the last two decades, Al Pacino decided to make...
Paid articleMichael Collins Shine (November 1996)
Richard Alleva HEROES & PRODIGIES 'Collins' & 'Shine' In Michael Collins, Irish revolutionaries fight the British forces everywhere: on the streets, inside public buildings, at police stations,...
Paid articleEntertaining Angels Dorothy Day appears on our cover in a sculpture by Charles Wells In a film about her life, she's missing (October 1996)
Richard Alleva DIMINISHING DOROTHY DAY 'Entertaining Angels' Whether she was in jail, simply walking in the street, buying groceries, asking directions, browsing in a bookstore, or waiting in...
Paid articleEmma Tin Cup (September 1996)
SCREEN Richard Alleva TWO HOLES IN ONE 'Emma & 'Tin Cup' In the title role of Douglas McGrath's film version of Emma, Gwyneth Paltrow was executing one of her character's many little social...
Paid articleTrainspotting (September 1996)
Richard Alleva NIETZSCHEAN EXPRESS 'Trainspotting' Irvine Welsh's acclaimed Trainspotting is a book of linked short stories, but the John Hodge (scenarist)- Danny Boyle (director) film adaptation...
Paid articleLone Star (August 1996)
SCREEN Richard Alleva WHO KILLED THE SHERIFF? John Sayles's 'Lone Star' Hone Star is John Sayles's latest exploration of The Way We Live Now. One of the very few filmmakers to have won...
Paid articleI Shot Andy Warhol Anne Frank Remembered Anne Frank was recognizably an adolescent even as she became a martyr (July 1996)
Richard Alleva INSANE TINES 'Warhol' &'Anne Frank' Madness resists drama. The irredeemably mad head straight for their abysses and watching this is boring, for they will never significantly...
Paid articleLast Dance (June 1996)
Richard Alleva DEAD WOMAN STUMBLES Beresford's 'Last Dance Uere is a sentence I wanted to write about Last Dance, the new Sharon Stone movie about capital punishment: "Though wiseacres call it...
Paid articleJane Eyre Zeffirelli gives us a muted Jane and a defanged Rochester (June 1996)
SCREEN Richard Alleva ME ROCHESTER, YOU Zeffirelli's 'Jane Eyre The latest screen version of Jane Eyre, directed by Franco Zeffirelli, has pace, sufficient atmosphere, and generally good acting....
Paid articleA Family Thing Antonia's Line In one film, a stale plot, lively dialogue, great acting, and a stab at truth In the other, P C reigns (May 1996)
Richard Alleva THE TRUE VS. THE CORRECT 'A Family Thing' & 'Antonia's Line' Touring the South in 1955, the writer Paul Goodman observed some white children coming out of school. Later, he noted...
Paid articleRichard III / Othello On the screen, Shakespeare gets scrambled and shrunken (April 1996)
Richard Alleva SLICED & DICED 'Richard III'&'Othello' There is a subgenre of science-fiction called "alternative universes," exemplified by such novels as Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High...
Paid articleMary Reilly/Before and After (April 1996)
Richard Alleva FATAL ATTRACTIONS 'Mary Reilly' & 'Before & After' Mary Reilly is a haunting, fas- cinating failure. It tells the Jekyll-Hyde yarn from the point-of-view of the doctor's Irish maid...
Paid articleSense and Sensibility Yes, the movie is just as good as you've heard Possibly even better (March 1996)
Richard Alleva EMMA CAN READ, TOO 'Sense and Sensibility' The only way to turn a classic novel into a vivid movie is to bring a lot of tough love to the project. Reverence alone won't do (as...
Paid articleLeaving Las Vegas Dead Nan Walking Our reviewer illuminates the difference between kitsch and art while judging the movie made of Sister Helen Prejean's Dead Man Walking both brilliant and disturbing (February 1996)
Richard Alleva DEATH TRIPS 'Leaving Las Vegas' & 'Dead Man Walking' In Leaving Las Vegas, Nicholas Cage plays Ben, a Hollywood scriptwriter who, upon being discharged for drunkenness, uses his...
Paid articleNixon By temperament, Oliver Stone is ideally suited to capture the paranoid style in Nixonian politics (January 1996)
SCREEN Richard Alleva TWO OF A KIND Stone & Nixon Nixon may not be the last word on the thirty-seventh president, but it is the ulti- mate Oliver Stone movie. The nature of the filmmaker is here,...
Paid articleCasino Gangsters, dames, jackpots, and rubouts Enough already (January 1996)
Richard Alleva THE MASTER MISSES Scorsese's 'Casino' I don't entertain the slightest doubt that Martin Scorsese is a great filmmaker, but I'm beginning to wonder if he's a good one. To put it...
Paid articleMighty Aphrodite Goldeneye Woody Allen deftly preaches the gospel of blissful ignorance, and James Bond keeps the Union Jack flying (December 1995)
SCREEN Richard Alleva TWO SMOOTH CHARACTERS 'Mighty Aphrodite' & 'Goldeneye' In one of his letters to Louis Untermeyer, Robert Frost insisted upon the essential cowardice of comedy, its function...
Paid articleGet Shorty Elmore Leonard fans will enjoy a near-perfect movie version of Get Shorty (December 1995)
SCREEN Richard Alleva LOOK AT HIM John Travolta in 'Get Shorty' Hew of us can enact our dreams in our jobs. That lawyer so diligently adding codicils to your will may harbor fantasies of...
Paid articleThe Scarlet Letter To Die For (November 1995)
SCREEN Richard Alleva 'A' IS FOR APPALLING 'The Scarlet Letter' & 'To Die For' Freely "adapted from the novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne" states-warns- one of the opening credits of Roland Joffe's...
Paid articleDevil in a Blue Dress Our reviewer hopes there will be a lot more Easy Rawlins films (November 1995)
SCREEN Richard Alleva vestigation. That yelp, that stutter, that flurry of fists, express so much of Rawlins's character-his daunting knowledge of what white men feel free to do to blacks, the...
Paid articleClockers (October 1995)
SCREEN Richard Alleva 'CLOCKERS': ACTION WITHOUT DRANA Spike Lee, sociologist Peck's bad boy makes good. Thaf s the gist of what most critics have written about Spike Lee's Clockers. You can hear...
Paid articleDesperado The Brothers McMullen (October 1995)
SCREEN Richard Alleva BOYS WITH CAMERAS 'Desperado' & 'The Brothers McMullen' I told him not to do it (see, Commonweal, July 16,1993). But he went right ahead and did it! Why don't movie...
Paid articleIT'S TIME TO TAKE SIDES Has Commonweal surrendered to the spirit of nihilism in the arts? No (September 1995)
Richard Alleva I asked the editors to print the excerpts from my reviews side by side with relevant quotes from Mr. Hagen's article [see page 22] for two reasons. First I wanted to set the record...
Paid articleThe Indian in the Cupboard Smoke (September 1995)
SCREEN Richard Alleva REEL PEOPLE, REAL PEOPLE 'Indian in the Cupboard' & 'Smoke' Han there be such a thing as an ascetic children's movie? If so, it's called The Indian in the Cupboard. What...
Paid articleScreen: (August 1995)
SCREEN SUSPENDED ANIMATION 'POCAHONTAS' & 'BATMAN' Could a cenobite escape them? No. The monastery's computer might break down and a repair person would show up wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with...
Paid articleScreen: (July 1995)
SCREEN ADULTERY PAYS EASTWOOD'S 'BRIDGES' Even as I write, the critics of National Public Radio and the better periodicals are reassuring their listeners and readers that they absolutely hated...
Paid articleScreen: (June 1995)
SCREEN WAY DOWN UNDER 'ONCE WERE WARRIORS' While watching Once Were Warriors, perhaps the most acclaimed movie ever to come out of New Zealand, I kept thinking of A Streetcar Named Desire....
Paid articleScreen (May 1995)
SCREEN FOUNDERING FATHER? 'JEFFERSON IN PARIS' In thirty years of collaboration, producer Ismael Merchant, director James Ivory, and writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala have created twenty-odd films, the...
Paid articleScreen: (May 1995)
SCREEN DEAREST MOMMY 'DOLORES CLAIBORNE' The eponymous heroine of Dolores Claiborne (Kathy Bates), implicated two decades ago in the murder of her husband but never charged, is now suspected of...
Paid articleScreen: (April 1995)
SCREEN NIHILISM ON HORSEBACK PECKINPAH'S 'BUNCH' RETURNS Somewhere in the fiction of Norman Mailer occurs the sentence, "They knew the hilarity of men for whom things had ended in utter...
Paid articleScreen (April 1995)
SCREEN ONE MOVIE, THREE PLOTS 'PRIEST' Paradoxical is both the making and the matter of Priest, written by Jimmy McGovern and directed by Antonia Bird. Almost every shot in this British movie...
Paid articleCorrespondence: (March 1995)
CORRESPONDENCE NRLC unheard Lawrence, Mass. To the Editors: Dr. Jim Hood's criticism [Correspondence, February 10] of the National Right to Life Committee's response to violence does not square...
Paid articleScreen: (March 1995)
SCREEN ROYAL TREATMENT BENNETT'S 'KING GEORGE' There is much to praise in The Madness of King George. Adapting his own play, Alan Bennett hasn' t attempted in-depth characterization but instead...
Paid articleScreen: (February 1995)
SCREEN PAUL NEWMAN PERFORMS HE'S'NOBODY'S FOOL' wonder if Garrison Keillor has seen Nobody's Fool and, if so, what he thinks of it. Though it's set in upstate New York rather than Keillor's...
Paid articleScreen (February 1995)
SCREEN OUR GANG ARMSTRONG'S 'LITTLE WOMEN' In Gillian Armstrong's new version of it, Little Women has become Spunky Women. Of course, there was no shortage of spunk in the classic 1933 George...
Paid articleScreen (January 1995)
SCREEN ANOTHER WASTELAND 'TOM & VIV' Walking out of the theater exhibiting Tom and Viv, the film about the unhappy union of T.S. Eliot and Vivien Haigh-Wood, I entertained a strange fantasy...
Paid articleScreen (December 1994)
16 SCREEN OVERLY SANGUINE 'INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE' ^^M ^^A ^HV atching Interview with the Vampire is ^^R^^B^^V Uke going to a college Halloween ball ^^^H^^^V thrown by the departments of...
Paid articleScreen (December 1994)
IN THE KINGDOM OF CRANKS 'ED WOOD' & 'ROAD TO WELLVILLE' merica, being the Emersonian land of selfreliance and self-invention, is also a nurturer of spectacular cranks. Think of Brook...
Paid articleScreen (November 1994)
SCREEN BEATEN TO A PULP TARANTINO'S 'FICTION' M aybe you have to be able to see through Quentin Tarantino before you can enjoy him. Like all his previous movies, Pulp Fiction is packed with...
Paid articleScreen (November 1994)
ADJUSTING TO HELL 'SHAWSHANK' & 'BLUE SKIES' ome wise guy might dismiss The Shawshank Redemption as Son of Cool Hand Luke. So it is, but it's more than that. Frank Darabont's adaptation of...
Paid articleScreen (October 1994)
SCREEN A POP QUIZ REDFORD'S 'QUIZ SHOW ¥he two white-collar workers, a man and a woman, slouch despondently near the office water cooler. In their despair they can hardly face each other,...
Paid articleScreen (October 1994)
BLOODY-MINDED STONE'S 'KILLERS' liver Stone hears Amenca screaming, so he joins right in His latest film, Natural Born Killers, tries to depict our putative love affair with violence both...
Paid articleScreen (September 1994)
FEATHERWEIGHT 'FORREST GUMP' feather wafts in the breeze at the start of Forrest Gump and comes to rest on the dirty sneaker of a man sitting on a bus stop bench. Forrest, a slightly retarded...
Paid articleScreen (August 1994)
SCREEN THE BEASTS OF SUMMER 'LION KING' & 'WOLF' T here are those who worry that The Lion King— with its on-screen murder of royal Mufasa and the guilt-tnp laid on his little son, Simba—is...
Paid articleScreen (July 1994)
A PORTRAIT OF EVIL 'THE BOYS OF SAINT VINCENT' In one of his poems, Bertolt Brecht looks at a Japanese carved mask representing the visage of an evil demon. Sympathetically I observe The...
Paid articleScreen (June 1994)
GOULD'S VARIATIONS THIRTY-TWO TAKES is two versions of Bach's Goldberg Variations bracketed the recording career of Glenn Gould. The first, released in 1956 with thirty-two contact-sheet...
Paid articleScreen (June 1994)
LOVE IN THE RUINS 'SAVAGE NIGHTS' & 'EPOQUE' o describe the (presumably) autobiographical hero of Cyril Collard's Savage Nights as bisexual is about as helpful as calling the Grand Canyon...
Paid articleScreen (May 1994)
SCREEN WHAT'S ENTERTAINMENT? THE PAPER' & 'PROXY' T he Paper zips along but how could it not? Ron Howard's movie, scnpted by Stephen and David Koepp, is not only a triumph of...
Paid articleScreen (May 1994)
SCREEN TILL DEATH DO US PART 'FOUR WEDDINGS & A FUNERAL' he great strength of Richard Curtis' s script for the comedy, Four Weddings and a Funeral, isn't its dialogue (though there...
Paid articleScreen (April 1994)
DRABNESS INTO POETRY 'GRAPE' & 'ANGIE' ¦ nearly bypassed What's Eating Gilbert Grape? because I had read somewhere a plot summary that made me cringe. Something about a boy trapped in...
Paid articleScreen (March 1994)
SCREEN ALL'S ILL THAT ENDS WELL 'REALITY BITES' & 'THE SNAPPER' ¦¦¦ ¦¦¦ umbug and self-humbug are indispensable to H^^^^^^f comedy. In fact, it's hard to name a comedy ¦^HJH^H or farce that...
Paid articleScreen (February 1994)
SCREEN ARIAS & GIGGLES 'PHILADELPHIA' & 'FATHER' Philadelphia deals with two subjects, one explicitly, the other implicitly, and neither one of them is AIDS. Each theme has its own...
Paid articleScreen (February 1994)
THE McCONNELL QUAKES THE ELECTRONIC HEARTH BLAZES onday, January 17, 1994, 4:32 a.m. The McConnell, back late Sunday night from an exhausting New York meeting of the National Book Critics...
Paid articleScreen (January 1994)
YANKED DOWN TO EARTH ATTENBOROUGH'S C.S. LEWIS I reviewed the stage play, Shadowlands, three years ago (Crisis, February 1991), praised it, but issued a warning that I now repeat re Richard...
Paid articleScreen (January 1994)
A WORD OF DISSENT THIS 'PIANO' IS OUT OF TUNE he Piano, written and directed by Jane Campion, has been touted as the art house masterpiece of early winter. It certainly displays all the...
Paid articleScreen (December 1993)
general, and the diocesan human rights commission denounced the arrest as a flagrant act of oppression directed against the church. Finally, when more than 4,000 indios marched on Tuxtla...
Paid articleScreen: (December 1993)
mise or qualify that value. SCREEN A byproduct of this line of argument could be a decision not to start someone on a therapy or technology for fear...
Paid articleScreen: (November 1993)
SCREEN IT'S ALL IN THE ACTING MAXWELL'S 'GETTYSBURG' G ettysburg was conceived as a television film for TNT, but Ted Turner and colleagues...
Paid articleScreen: (November 1993)
will not do, and of writing in a crucial passage that "Everything Francois Mauriac, Stone could say of himself, "I am a meta- seemed obviated in its plainsong," which is questionable...
Paid articleScreen: (October 1993)
Corots. And some is ridiculous, like the Renoir watercolor ...
Paid articleScreen: (October 1993)
sistance" to the government has given prosecutors a powerful tool for persuading (or, some critics say, coercing) defendants to cooperate, which in turn has resulted in more convictions...
Paid articleScreen: (August 1993)
faith that the state seeks to regulate or forbid become less cen- quire more searching inquiries than the Supreme Court gener- tral, the state's burden of justification grows...
Paid articleScreen (July 1993)
a vehicle that Ron Leibman makes the most of. For Cohn, life is the getting and wielding of power, which is why he denies his homosexuality, renames his AIDS to the straighter cancer because gays...
Paid articleScreen: (June 1993)
SCREEN action of Much Ado is the return of soldiers from war, dan- ger,...
Paid articleScreen (June 1993)
SCREEN intense passages are like the scenes in war movies in...
Paid articleScreen (May 1993)
a victory for no one. 6221 may have been a voyage of dis- binieri are charged with escorting the children to an orphanage covery for its author, as the program note suggests, but...
Paid articleScreen (April 1993)
also hints at broader meanings, just as the reconciliation with SCREEN nature to which Al Gore calls America implies more than a re- lation to the nonhuman environment. From its Columbian be-...
Paid articleScreen: (April 1993)
rooted in religious tradition and, if their understanding and knowl- The action unfolds in parallel lines. Michael Douglas, recently edge are deficient, they have nonetheless remained...
Paid articleScreen: (March 1993)
ignores forces within the continent (and even within the world to gospel criteria, independently of various political persuasions. of the poor) that keep people in poverty:...
Paid articleScreen (March 1993)
(I have tried that with some of them) they would not add up to At Christmas of 1961, Pope John XXIII issued an apostolic a compelling...
Paid articleScreen (February 1993)
SCREEN their mutual longings. After some old comrades-in-arms,...
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ment which we all struggle to provide for our children is ac- pletely fictional character called Bobby Ciarro (played by di- tually of no moral or characterological consequence. Just...
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SCREEN paste grinning down at black men who must look up at...
Paid articleScreen (December 1992)
SCREEN SMOKE ON THE HORIZON 'MOHICANS' & 'DRACULA' ¦ groaned when I found out last summer that it was Michael Mann who was filming the latest adaptation of The Last of the Mohicans. What...
Paid articleScreen (November 1992)
GOODBY. COLUMBUS RIDLEY SCOTT'S'1492' erhaps it was inevitable. Making a movie about Columbus for this year of all years was bound to unnerve any filmmaker. Yet it's impossible to forgive what...
Paid articleScreen (November 1992)
SCREEN THREE FACES OF VINCENT PIALET'S 'VAN GOGH' he late Marvin Mudrick once wrote that "for the mass media...Poe, Van Gogh, and Toulouse- Lautrec are spectacularly visible, they are...
Paid articleScreen (October 1992)
NOUVEAU ALLEN 'HUSBANDS AND WIVES' o Woody Allen film runs its course without at least one good quip on its sound track. Judy Davis gets to deliver a great one in Husbands and Wives when, as a...
Paid articleScreen (October 1992)
CLINT'S DARK VISION EASTWOOD'S 'UNFORGIVEN' With the Westerner, it is a crucial point of honor not to "do it first"; his gun remains in its holster until the moment of combat.. ..The Westerner...
Paid articleScreen (September 1992)
SCREEN MA & PA BERGMAN THE BEST INTENTIONS' To say that the first half of The Best Intentions is boring and the second mesmerizing would be to overstate the case, but not grossly. By...
Paid articleScreen (September 1992)
A TWO-BAGGER & A BUNT 'PATRIOT GAMES' & 'LEAGUE' reat thrillers, like The Thirty-Nine Steps, contain comedy, pathos, and romance as well as hairbreadth escapes, but merely good thrillers aren't so...
Paid articleScreen (August 1992)
'MEOW!' SHE ROARED 'BATMAN RETURNS' ven simple entertainment isn't simple anymore. Take the Tim Burton-Batman enterprise for example. The very first frames of the first installment announced that...
Paid articleScreen (July 1992)
ALIENATED RIPLEY'S BELIEVE IT OR NOT here's a sick but potent subtext roiling through all three of the Alien movies. The first one, Alien, contained a nightmarish image of impregnation and birth....
Paid articleScreen (June 1992)
LEAST MOBILE OF MASKS ALBERT FINNEY IN THE PLAYBOYS' certain general was extolling the patriotism of a certain courtier to the last emperor of the Austro-Hungarians. Franz Josef listened with...
Paid articleScreen (June 1992)
SCREEN ROBERT ALTMAN IS BACK 'THE PLAYER' In his glory days, Robert Altman was a subverter of conventional stories. He took a standard service-comedy novel and turned it into that ode to hip...
Paid articleScreen (May 1992)
SCREEN VISIBILITY NIL ALLEN'S 'SHADOWS & FOG' I'm beginning to understand why Zelig was one of Woody Allen's best movies. That witty fantasy dealt with a human chameleon, a man without a...
Paid articleScreen (April 1992)
SCREEN DYING OF HEAT VERHOEVEN'S 'BASIC INSTINCT' ying," like "spending," was for the Elizabethans a metaphor meaning orgasm. The young lover of Thomas Kyd's play, The Spanish Tragedy, enjoys...
Paid articleScreen (April 1992)
SCREEN OFF KEY & ON 'VENUS' & 'HEAR MY SONG' Meeting Venus is a beautifully detailed film but only its details work. This movie is like a lecturer who can't defend his thesis coherently but...
Paid articleScreen (March 1992)
SCREEN SILLY SECRETS 'FRIENDS' & 'FINAL ANALYSIS' ennis Potter's Secret Friends is a jigsaw puzzle that doesn't give you much to look at once you've assembled it. Of course, the fun of...
Paid articleScreen (March 1992)
SCREEN BRILLIANT ODDITY TOLKIN'S 'THE RAPTURE' I've just seen the most original, the most audacious, the most disturbing American film of the last two decades. And you haven't. And you're not...
Paid articleScreen (February 1992)
STAGE IDENTITY CRISIS 'SIGHT UNSEEN,' 'DIVIDENDS,' & 'BEAU' It is easy to be unfair to Donald Margulies as a playwright— to say, as did the friend who accompanied me to Sight Unseen at the...
Paid articleScreen (February 1992)
SCREEN ASSASSINATIONS 'BUGSY' & 'JFK' ugly has much to recommend it—electric acting, gleaming photography by Allan Daviau that charges the physical world of the film with the lurid...
Paid articleScreen (January 1992)
SCREEN FANTASIES & GIMMICKS 'PROSPERO' & 'HOOK' Peter Greenaway, a self-preening postmodernist who couldn't articulate the simplest story to save his life, has made an adaptation of...
Paid articleScreen (January 1992)
SCREEN INTO THE WILDERNESS BERESFORD'S 'BLACK ROBE' Black Robe, Brian Moore's brief but complicated novel about a would-be martyr who learns that his real martyrdom is to stay alive in the...
Paid articleScreen (December 1991)
stance. While Faisal Husseini spoke--hunched over the microphone, trying to hold the attention of the university audience-hooded PFLP activists plastered the walls with pictures of...
Paid articleScreen (December 1991)
this...couldn't be applied to alcohol abuse or other potential reasons for termination of parental rights." One cannot say how the future will shape this inchoate doctrine. But who knows? There...
Paid articleScreen (November 1991)
(Continued from page 687) Two singers/readers at stage right provide the narrative for the piece. They deliver the pertinent quotations and comments, and sing the music of Christopher Thall and...
Paid articleScreen (October 1991)
elections the PRI took a drubbing in Chalco, it scored a 60percent-plus triumph in municipal elections last November, and its candidates scored notable victories in August as well. It...
Paid articleScreen (October 1991)
foul-mouthed, nihilistic ex-psychiatrist, a role that cries out for one of the sleazeball turns in Rip Tom's repertoire, not for Williams's unquenchable cuteness. As a sinister housekeeper, Hanna...
Paid articleScreen (September 1991)
In his "savage comedy," as the subtitle calls it, Leguizamo presents a gallery of Latino characters (the program lists seven, but he chooses among them so that no performance is exactly like the...
Paid articleScreen (September 1991)
kitchens, one kosher, and a common dining room. The arch- diocese hopes that the building will be inaugurated with the visit of an Israeli youth delegation. The rest of the center will have a...
Paid articleScreen (August 1991)
sexual roles--and in the final ball scene they waltz together, artificial figures in a world that no longer has room for them. Blood gushes from Casanova's crotch, spreading across his...
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SCREEN PLUMB LINE TO THE SOUL AMELIO'S 'OPEN DOORS' etours are always at hand to keep us well away from the heart of a masterpiece. At least three of these alternate routes were being...
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S.E. Mead Amputations Without anesthesia, walking sticks behind a cyclone fence getting through most days on only one bowl of porridge. Swallowing's strenuous, some throat nearly closing over...
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and marked passages. My own counsel at present would be for American Catholics (and kindred souls) to reread their Vitoria, who sought to warn his fellow Spaniards, as they embarked for America,...
Paid articleScreen (May 1991)
or a mental case leading the parade. Percy's Catholicism, acquainted with sorrow, familiar with failings and yet confident in God, belongs and connects in that swampy, beautiful place. I found...
Paid articleScreen (April 1991)
ination of slavery--helped to legitimize the destruction of Native American culture. Both slavery and Native American culture were sacrificed on the same altar of democratic and...
Paid articleScreen (March 1991)
and the family. He heads an institute founded by the pope at the Lateran University dedicated to research on family matters. His viewpoints on a range of issues came through clearly in a long...
Paid articleScreen (March 1991)
the centrality of "the eschatological" and "the messianic" in the early Christian movement, and the integration of the mystical and the prophetic which these categories require. We have created a...
Paid articleScreen (February 1991)
SCREEN LESS THAN EPIC 'GODFATHER III' t's depressing to watch a film about aridity that is itself arid. In The Godfather: Part I11, the aging Michael Corleone is withering. But so is the...
Paid articleScreen (February 1991)
There is a scene at the high table in which the conventional sympathy of his colleagues sets Jack off in an angry diatribe--the anger more apparent to me than the exact words were...
Paid articleScreen (January 1991)
and the DESTINY of MAN Charles Le Gai Eaton "This work is one of the most eloquent and penetrating studies on Islam to appear in a European language. It presents Islam in such a manner that...
Paid articleScreen (January 1991)
Here to Eternity back in 1951. If the sequence has any purpose in the play (Guare's admirers love him for the absurdist jumps in his work), it is to indicate that Paul's charm and his lies can be...
Paid articleScreen: (December 1990)
SCREEN SUNNY & CLAUS 'REVERSAL OF FORTUNE' & 'HUNTER' Adapting a gimmick from Sunset Boulevard (William Holden's corpse explaining the events leading up to Holden's murder), Reversal of Fortune...
Paid articleScreen: (December 1990)
SCREEN BADFELLAS 'MILLER'S CROSSING' & 'GOODFELLAS' Two new gangster movies, Miller's Crossing and GoodFellas, each has a virtuosic scene in which the camera follows the action through corridors,...
Paid articleScreen (November 1990)
SCREEN WHAT WRITERS DO 'HENRY & JUNE' Just as opera characters must sing, movie characters must move or at least give the camera something to look at. But suppose a filmmaker takes a writer as...
Paid articleScreen (November 1990)
SCREEN AT THE EDGES 'POSTCARDS' & TALL GUY' Postcards from the Edge: "When he thinks, he's a child," Goethe said of Byron. Just the opposite is true of the somewhat less titanic but equally...
Paid articleScreen (October 1990)
A CONJURER FALTERS KUROSAWA'S 'DREAMS' Sometimes even wizards weary of magic. The wizard in question is Akira Kurosawa, and his latest magical conjuring act is Dreams. It's an episodic film that,...
Paid articleScreen: (October 1990)
SCREEN THEYDUNIT 'TWO JAKES' & 'PRESUMED INNOCENT' The Two Jakes is a haunted movie and the discomfiting spirit haunting it is another movie: Chinatown. Because its atmosphere of dread, doomed...
Paid articleScreen (September 1990)
SCREEN IMPROBABLE BLUES LEE'S 'MO' BETTER BLUES' In some works of art, we encounter ambiguities that can trouble us into an awareness of the mystery of life. But sometimes ambiguities are bred...
Paid articleScreen: (September 1990)
SCREEN TOO HOT, TOO COOL MALLE'S 'MAY FOOLS' M ay Fools is one of Louis Malle's milder works. It's too richly textured to be com- pletely forgettable, yet too diffuse to sear itself into your...
Paid articleScreen: (August 1990)
SCREEN TRIVIAL PURSUITS TOTAL RECALL' & 'DICK TRACY' Watching the only bedroom scene in Total Recall (which must have received its R rating for violence, not sex), I understood why so many...
Paid articleScreen (July 1990)
SCREEN DEATH IN A TIME OF AIDS RENE'S 'LONGTIME COMPANION' In life, a dying person deserves our sympathy simply because he or she shares our humanity. But when a fictional character has been...
Paid articleScreen (June 1990)
STAGE MAGGIE FOR THE FUN OF IT 'LETTICE & LOVAGE' cannot swear to it but I suspect I was the only person who found himself thinking about an obscure World War II melodrama while watching Maggie...
Paid articleScreen: (June 1990)
SOMETHING TO GAG ON GREENAWAY'S 'COOK' The English film director Peter Greenaway is a startling picture maker and a lousy storyteller. In Cinematic Utopia he would be commissioned to create short,...
Paid articleReligious book week critics' choices (March 1990)
RELIGIOUS BOOK WEEK CRITICS' CHOICES "Religious Books: Critics' Choices" has annually recommended new books in religion. This year we invited our critics to write instead about books, religious or...
AuthorAlleyn, Violet
AuthorAlling, Kenneth Slade
AuthorAllitt, Patrick
AuthorAllman, Mark J.
AuthorAllport, Gordon W.
AuthorAlma, Nasira
AuthorAlmedingen, E. M.
AuthorAlmedingen, Edith
AuthorAlmedingen, Edith M.
AuthorAlomar, Osama
AuthorAlperin, Lee
AuthorAlsan, Marcella
AuthorAlsop, Joseph
AuthorAlstott, Anne
AuthorAltany, Alan
AuthorAltbach, Philip G
AuthorAltbach, Philip G.
AuthorAlter, Stephen
AuthorAltmann, Howard
AuthorALTREUTER, TEDDY C.
AuthorALVERY, REV. A.
AuthorAlves, Marcio M.
AuthorAlves, Marcio Moreira
AuthorAman, Kenneth
AuthorAman, Kenneth J
AuthorAmar, Joseph
AuthorAmar, Joseph Phillip
AuthorAmbrose, Kay
AuthorAment, Ernest P.
AuthorAmery, Carl
AuthorAmes, Bernice
AuthorAmes, L. S.
AuthorAMES, RUTH M.
AuthorAmidei, Nancy
AuthorAMMANN, MARY
AuthorAnda, Charles Taylor, William T. Cavanaugh, Vinson Cunningham, Neomi De
AuthorAnda, Neomi De
AuthorANDERSEN, CAROL DELLMANN
AuthorAndersen, Robert
AuthorAnderson, Anita Tanner, Joan I Siegel, David Garrison, Jeanne
AuthorAnderson, Chris
AuthorAnderson, Donald C
AuthorAnderson, Donald C.
AuthorAnderson, Donald Louis
AuthorAnderson, Floyd
AuthorAnderson, Gary A.
AuthorAnderson, George E
AuthorAnderson, George E.
AuthorAnderson, George M.
AuthorAnderson, Kathleen
AuthorAnderson, Paul Ernest
AuthorAnderson, Perry
AuthorAnderson, Thomas P.
AuthorAnderson, Waiter V.
AuthorAnderson, Walter
AuthorAnderson, Walter V.
AuthorAndolsen, Barbara Hilkert
AuthorAndrea, Marianne
AuthorAndreassi, Anthony D.
AuthorAndrew
AuthorAndrews, B. A. St.
AuthorAndrews, B.A. St.
AuthorAndrews, Frances M.
AuthorAndrews, George Lawrence
AuthorAndrews, Wayne
AuthorAndrews-Hoke, Magda
AuthorAndrews:, Gerald Weales, Wayne
AuthorAngelita, Sister M.
AuthorAnion, Peter F.
AuthorAnnett, Anthony
AuthorAnnHarrigan
AuthorAnonymous
AuthorAnreus, Alejandro
AuthorAnscar, Hans
AuthorAnson, Peter F.
AuthorAntepara, Robin
AuthorAnthony, S. H.
AuthorAntoninus, Brother
AuthorAntonucci, Emil
AuthorAnxiety, William Allen White's America--The Pharisees and other Essays--Revolution before Breakfast-
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