Richard Alleva
If you find it all too easy to sneer at Protestant fundamentalist sects whose members display an enthusiasm during worship that resembles hysteria, you have to be grateful for such films as Tender Mercies, The Apostle, and now Vera Farmiga’s directorial debut, Higher Ground.
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Celia Wren
It might seem odd to apply the term “understated” to a documentary that features gritty combat footage. But a quiet, poignant restraint is a key note of Hidden Battles, a graceful study of how the act of killing affects soldiers’ mental health.
Rand Richards Cooper
Reviews of new French films Point Blank & Sarah’s Key
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verdicts
- All the World's a (Political) Stageby Celia Wren Just can’t get enough of cutthroat politics? Find yourself on YouTube, replaying the meaner jabs from the Republican primary debates? You might want to add the 1990s BBC miniseries House of Cards to your Ne...
- You Were Silly Like Usby Anthony DomesticoIn his 1941 poem “At the Grave of Henry James,” W. H. Auden expressed his hope that writers would be judged not by their lives, but by their works:
All will be judged. Master of nuance and scruple, Pray for me and for all writers living or dead; B...
- The Other Show on BBCby Anthony DomesticoIt’s official: America has Downton Abbey fever. You can’t open a newspaper or visit a culture/books website without reading about how Downton Abbey is
- Finding Wisdom (II)by Scott D. Moringiello“A ‘canon’ so established in practice serves not so much to enshrine a hundred books as to help students to develop their own standards of evaluation. The canon (if such it be) and the questioning of it go together. There must be questioning, and there must be som...
- Love at First Readby Anthony DomesticoAt one point in Jonathan Franzen’s 2010 novel Freedom, Walter and Patty Berglund, the married couple at the center of the narrati...
- Half-honest Menby Lauretta O'ConnorI do feel as though I am lowering the tone of this enterprise by writing once again about crime. Robert Lewis's The Bank of the Black Sheep is set in the gray, damp, cold of a Welsh winter, a variation on the theme of the feckless private detective. It's a ...
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