Boyhood Produced and distributed by IFC Directed and written by Richard Linklater Richard Linklater’s Boyhood became the critics’ darling upon its staged release at the end of 2014. From The New Yorker to the Daily News, reviewers have vied with one another to sing its praises. Most of them think it’s a natural coming of...
Inherent Vice Produced and distributed by Warner Brothers Directed and written by Paul Thomas Anderson, based on the novel by Thomas Pynchon Birdman Produced by New Regency Pictures Directed and written by Alejandro González Iñárritu Distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures You never know what you’ll learn at the movies. Watching the two films under review this...
You turn on the radio for the weather report: “Sunny and warm today, with a high near 80. Light breeze out of the south at five miles per hour. Chance of rain less than ten percent.” Outside your window, you watch the winds rage and the rains pour. Which are you going to believe, your...
“Putin, the master of the game, controls all the pieces on the chessboard and carefully divides up the areas of power,” writes influential French columnist Christine Ockrent in her most recent book, Les Oligarques. Her view is shared by most Western analysts and media commentators, regardless of their position on the person and policies of...
If I were a North Korean leader, or even an ISIS head chopper, I’d be reveling in the fact that a former American black basketball star spoke more plainly about race in America than any member of our political class or media. Charles Barkley doesn’t mince words. Many of his fellow blacks were not pleased...
The biggest mystery and conundrum of our time is not whether Stalin died a natural death, or why the CIA had Kennedy killed, but the difference between the types of individual that rise socially in the West and, respectively, in Russia or China. In the 1980’s my father wrote extensively of the problem of the...
Interstellar Produced and distributed by Paramount Pictures Directed by Christopher Nolan Screenplay by Christopher and Jonathan Nolan Nightcrawler Produced by Bold Films Written and directed by Dan Gilroy Distributed by Open Road Films In their latest film, Interstellar, Christopher Nolan and his brother Jonathan have tried to revive a tired science-fiction premise about the world’s...
“Pope Francis: Caring for the Poor Doesn’t Make You a Communist,” screamed the headline the day before Halloween. Perhaps not, I thought when I read the story, but why is it that caring for the world’s poor always seems to involve massive national and international programs of wealth transfer that might have been copied directly...
Chuck Hagel’s abrupt departure from the Pentagon on November 24 became inevitable after weeks of disagreement with the White House over strategy against the Islamic State (IS). The split had become public a month earlier, when Hagel’s blunt two-page memorandum on Middle East policy was leaked to the press. Addressed to national security advisor Susan...
I was not surprised that Chuck Hagel had to go. After all, he was among the very few in governments of late to have ever seen combat, not to mention to have been wounded. Men of his ilk do not draw their swords at the drop of a hat—unlike neocons, that is, who demand bloody...
Gone Girl Produced by New Regency Pictures Directed by David Fincher Screenplay by Gillian Flynn, from her novel Distributed by Twentieth Century Fox If only James Thurber were still with us. I’d love to hear him address Gone Girl, both Gillian Flynn’s novel and David Fincher’s film adaptation thereof. Why? Because the story trades on...
George Nevers and Mary McKenna were married in 1881 in New Brunswick, Canada. He was from an old Sunbury County family, but her parents were immigrants to neighboring York County from Ireland. The Neverses would have eight children. The first two were born in Canada, and the rest in either Minnesota or Wisconsin after the...
Dante Alighieri died here in Ravenna, a little city where any sane man or woman might well choose to live and die. Like most people, I come here from time to time to stare stupidly at the Roman and Byzantine mosaics—though as the years go by I notice most people are letting their cameras and...
Opera has been in the news lately—in Paris and New York, that is. And no, this doesn’t mean things are culturally looking up—to the contrary, I’m afraid. Let’s start with the City of Light, where millions of Muslims surround the capital (most of them in the suburbs), waiting for the day they can sweep away...
This past year, we have heard a great deal about the centennial of the outbreak of World War I. Throughout that commemoration, though, we have rarely paid due attention to the religious language of Holy War and crusade deployed by all combatants. Think, for instance, of the great historic moment that many will remember this...
Calvary Produced by Reprisal Films and The Irish Film Board Directed and written by John Michael McDonagh Distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures In his novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), James Joyce has the father of his protagonist, Stephen Daedalus, bitterly complain of the Irish people, “We are an unfortunate priest-ridden...
Two months after the beginning of the U.S. bombing campaign against the Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) and one month after President Obama announced his strategy for fighting the group, the area under jihadist control continues to expand. In the east, IS forces have advanced to the outskirts of Baghdad and may soon be able...
“They’re back,” cries the little girl in the movie, when the demons from Hell reappear on her television screen. The phrase, a cliché in the cliché-driven headlines of the Washington Post and Time, comes to mind at the beginning of every election cycle, as gibberish-driveling demons like Hillary and Joe, Sarah and Newt get interviewed...
The latest brouhaha about professional football players beating up their little wimmen has me shocked, shocked! that such a thing could take place in modern-day America, Home of the Depraved. But before I go on about why black football multimillionaires don’t get enough violence on the playing field but have to bring it home with...
Russians have bragged to themselves about their souls for ages, but for the past hundred years or so—roughly since Nietzsche discovered Dostoyevsky, Henry James discovered Turgenev, and the assorted Bloomsbury folk discovered Chekhov—other European nations, Britain foremost, have been pitching in as well. The dubious outcome of it all is that, alongside bast shoes, pinewood...
Born in 1905 in Roxbury, Massachusetts, Joseph Timothy O’Callahan was reared in a devout Irish Catholic family. He took to learning with a passion and earned his bachelor’s degree by the time he was 20, and his doctorate at the age of 24. Shortly afterward, he joined the faculty of the physics department at Boston...
A Most Wanted Man Produced by The Ink Factory and Film 4 Directed by Anton Corbijn Screenplay by Andrew Bovell from John Le Carre’s novel Distributed by Roadside Attractions John Le Carre has made a career of demonstrating that intelligence agencies are fundamentally untrustworthy. The very nature of their work, he suggests, makes them prone...
In the final days of August the stage seemed set for a major escalation of America’s air war against the Islamic State (IS, also known as ISIS or ISIL). The operation, which started with limited tactical strikes between Mosul and Erbil—initially to save stranded refugees, then to help the Kurds defend their capital—was about to...
A police officer stops two black teenagers sashaying down the middle of a public street. According to law enforcement and at least one noninvolved witness, one of the two—a six-foot four-inch, 300-pound behemoth—charges the cop and goes for his gun. Fighting for his life, the policeman shoots and kills the “gentle giant,” who, as it...
An American friend who is very well connected in Washington, D.C., was telling me he’s worried about Europe. “So what else is new?” I said. “No, I really mean it. Future generations could grow up under Islamic rule.” It was a John McEnroe moment, as in You can’t be serious. He assured me he was. ...
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes Produced by Chernin Entertainment Directed by Matt Reeves Screenplay by Mark Bomback and Rick Jaffa Distributed by Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation Snowpiercer Produced by Opus Pictures Directed by Bong Joon-ho Screenplay by Bong Joon-ho and Kelly Masterson Distributed by The Weinstein Company As titles go, Dawn of...
It has been a summer of major strategic blunders by the United States and Russia over Ukraine and by the United States in the Middle East, where the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS, now renamed simply the Islamic Caliphate) has emerged as a major player, threatening what little remains of the region’s stability....
And the people in the houses All went to the university Where they were put in boxes And they came out all the same . . . In “Little Boxes” Malvina Reynolds was protesting against the conformity of the 1950’s, when core requirements and a limited number of majors still ensured some measure of common...
My Sicilian friend Manlio has something in him of the late Curtis Cate, who was a mutual friend of mine and Tom Fleming’s and a frequent contributor to these pages. When Curtis died in 2006 aged 82, I did not think to write an obituary. For some reason, one whose perennial argument with the heart...
Boo to the CIA! It got caught spying on Germany, and its top man in Berlin has been sent home. What I’d like to know is what’s so important about Berlin’s open-book policies that we had to play dirty? Maybe our ex-top man in the German capital should now concentrate on weeding out Israeli spies...
I may be stereotyping Chronicles readers unfairly, but I suspect that not many read witches&pagans. If your subscription has lapsed, I draw your attention to a recent feature that actually has far-reaching consequences for more mainstream believers of all kinds. In an interview, well-known pagan author Diana L. Paxson complained that The generation that founded...
The mystery of brightness is more profound than the mystery of darkness, and that of stillness perhaps the most profound of all. In the noontime glare the heart of the Gila wilderness in southwestern New Mexico is both bright and still, the sole sound the drone of a circling horsefly, the only breath the imperceptible...
Five years ago, the California state legislature voted to apologize to the Chinese for former laws that discriminated against them, including the federal government’s Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which California congressmen championed. The apology bill was sponsored by state assembly members Paul Fong and Kevin de León. Fong said he was not planning on...
Ida Produced by Canal + Polska Directed by Pawel Pawlikowski Screenplay by Pawel Pawlikowski and Rebecca Lenkiewicz Distributed by Music Box Films The personal is the political: This 1960’s catchphrase defiantly bandied by leftists and feminists has always seemed to me childishly peevish. It’s as if, in a fit of collective pique, those on the...
The Great War started 100 years ago this August. The most tragic event in human history, that war destroyed a vibrant, magnificently creative civilization. A prosperous and well-ordered world was shattered forever. New killing machines that only a generation earlier did not exist were deployed on a massive scale: airplanes, tanks, poison gases, submarines. The...
This is our annual summer vacation issue, which means I am free to ramble on like an old lizard soaking up gin and sunshine at the beach and telling stories that all begin, “Did I ever tell you about the time . . . ” Did I ever tell you about the time I first...
When did World War II start? An American is entitled to think it started with Pearl Harbor, as, clearly, the world without the United States is only a world in part. But ask an Englishman, and he will say the world war began some two years earlier, when Britain declared war on Germany. A Russian...
The greatest criminal and most profitable enterprise in the world is FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association). As I write, billions are watching obscenely overpaid footballers competing for a cup that is long overdue for a total remake. The World Cup was a very good idea long ago, but so was selective democracy and waging...
Blue Ruin Produced by The Lab of Madness Written and directed by Jeremy Saulnier Distributed by RADiUS-TWC Hateship Loveship Produced by The Film Community Directed by Liza Johnson Written by Mark Poirier from Alice Munro’s story Distributed by IFC Films Revenge, we’re told, is a dish best served cold. But is this true? Director Jeremy...
“This is the biggest contract in the history of the gas sector of the former USSR,” Vladimir Putin said after the $400 billion agreement to supply Russian natural gas to China was signed in Shanghai on May 21. It is much more than that, Putin went on: It is an “epochal event.” China’s President Xi...
The Great War and its inevitable successor have been called Europe’s civil war, and there is some truth in this characterization. Divided by language, religion, and culture, the nations of Europe were nonetheless united in a common civilization that developed out of the ruins of the Christianized Roman Empire. Despite the strains brought on by...
A few months ago I found myself stranded in Piccadilly. There was a parade of women—of a decidedly Sapphic cast, I thought—carrying placards with slogans that admonished men for their proclivity to rape, violence, and pillage. Most prominent was a sign that read “No Means No,” its message being, supposedly, that when a woman refuses...
I write this while American unmanned flights and 18 American “specialists” are looking for those 200 unfortunate girls abducted by Boko Haram, a group our very own Hillary Clinton had refused to place on the State Department’s terrorist watch list. Boko Haram is as bad as it gets and as violent as can be, but...
It seems that Benghazi is remembered today only for the 2012 attack on the American diplomatic mission there. In the 1940’s and 50’s, though, it was known for launching the planes that conducted Operation Tidal Wave, a brilliant example of the heroism of American airmen, and an equally brilliant example of Murphy’s Law. The former...
Noah Produced and distributed by Paramount Pictures Written and directed by Darren Aronofsky The Unknown Known Produced by The Weinstein Company, History Films, and Moxie Pictures Written and directed by Errol Morris Distributed by RADIUS-TWC In Darren Aronofsky’s telling of the Noah story, Cain’s descendant Tubalcain (Ray Winstone) confronts his creator, growling these words: “I...
To a casual observer it might seem that President Barack Obama’s four-nation tour of East Asia, which took him to Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, and the Philippines, came at a time of America’s undisputed global predominance. The visit strengthened existing U.S. military commitments to the region, created some new ones, irritated China, and emboldened American...
“‘I am half sick of shadows,’ said The Lady of Shalott.” “We’ve turned into a nation of TV watchers, video-game players, and virtual sex addicts,” observed the cheerful old cynic. “How is that so different,” asked the resentful 30-something adolescent, “from earlier generations that spent all their time reading poetry and fiction or going to...
“All may have if they dare try a glorious life or grave.” I saw those words—George Herbert’s, as it turned out—incised into the stonework of a church near Waterloo Station. There was a little churchyard nearby, it was a warm spring afternoon, and I think I must have read those words over a thousand times. ...
I never listen to pop music, but I do know the difference between the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. I even know one of the Stones’ daughters, Theodora Richards, as she went out with the son of a friend who brought her aboard my boat. (Incredibly, she had very good manners.) Pink Floyd—it’s a band—I...
There are people who think the classics are a dated luxury. Anyone who believes that should stay far away from the Christian Bible. It’s been many years since I was able to read the New Testament in English. Now, don’t think I’m showing off there. My Greek is not wonderful, and I find a parallel...