Updated 3/15/2020

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three is a comic thriller, or thrilling comedy, retrieved from the volatile alchemy of "Drop Dead"-era New York. Almost everyone in it is as irritated as a chafing thigh. Yet it is an odd sort of love note to the asphalt Inferno. This is my...

I’m a longtime Nabokov nut, and am going through one of my recurrent Vladimanias. In the last month I’ve read, by the man himself, Nabokov’s Quartet, Nabokov’s Dozen, Strong Opinions, and Speak, Memory; Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya, his collected correspondence with Edmund...

Dusty in Memphis, one of the all-time greats, was released 50 years ago today.
You know how you have first exposures that you always remember, that never go away, that become part of your entire memory package around a piece of work?
Back in the age before CD, after ye...

I Wanna Hold Your Hand (1978), which is coming out from The Criterion Collection, was an altogether not-bad movie, as I recall, whose stock rose retroactively when it became clear that its first-time director, Robert Zemeckis, had become one of the most Zeitgeisty if l...

Slaughterhouse-Five, which turns 50 this year, is one of those books that in my reading life has undergone a real evolution, by which I can track my own changes. Reading it as a preteen, I was tickled, perhaps dazzled, but undeniably quite confused. Reading it as a tee...

Late to the party as usual, I earlier watched an episode of the acclaimed, now-three-seasons-old IFC comedy series Documentary Now!, with each installment a parody of some familiar (at least to some) doc style or subject. This was the recent episode based on D.A. Penne...

Arthur Koestler died this day in 1983, age 77. His great novel Darkness at Noon (1941), concerning the party purges and show trials of Stalin’s Soviet Union, manages to be suspenseful, though its ending is never in doubt; to be specific, though the relevant nations and...

Kate Chopin was born today in 1850. The Awakening (1899), a novel, is her essential work, and "The Story of an Hour" (1894) among the briefest, bleakest, most haunting of American stories. They are the best of her studies of women who, more than rebelling against the l...

The news that Peter Jackson will be assembling a new version of the Beatles' Get Back-Let It Be footage is interesting and exciting. Jackson says he will undo the "myth" of the sessions, that they were snarky and unproductive and no one wanted to be there. But it was t...

Hawthorne's The Celestial Railroad, comprising stories published between 1832 and 1851, is recommended for the well-known items, which remain frightening, ambiguous, many-sided, and in some essential way deranged ("Young Goodman Brown," "The Minister's Black Veil," "Th...