Screen
John Hughes for kids
Released a year ago, the first Diary of a Wimpy Kid movie captured remarkably little of the sly charm of the Jeff Kinney books that line my son’s bookshelf. The film did, however, capture enough of the fan base to warrant a sequel. And here we are. And it’s a little ...
Lady liberty triumphant
If a revolution could ever be distilled into a single image, then let it be Delacroix’s commemoration of the French Revolution’s July 1830 victory,...
The last masterpiece
On April 23, 1917, Buster Keaton made his theatrical debut in Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle’s The Butcher Boy. Three years later, Keaton would strike out...
The long goodbye
Dick Johnson isn’t dead. Not yet, at least. But he will be. We all will, sooner or later. And it’s sooner for Dick if...
‘Keanu’ is bloated ‘Key & Peele,’ for better or worse
You either find it unbearably funny that a suburban dad named Clarence finds himself in a strip club called HPV surrounded by hardcore gangsters...
Liveaction Oscar shorts a big deal
Start small. That’s the guiding dictum for everything from biological evolution to filmmaking. The live-action shorts that mark the start of most directors’ careers rarely see the light of day outside of specialized festivals; that is, except for the lucky bunch ...
You can’t always get what you want
Tenet opens not with a bang, but with an explosion. Chaos coordinated with cinematic clarity courtesy Christopher Nolan. The setting is a concert hall...
Not a good look
"More plot!” demanded not one single fan of the original Zoolander. So, of course, writers Justin Theroux, Ben Stiller, Nicholas Stoller and John Hamburg...
Noir on the range
Nowadays we call them noir, but back in the 1940s and ’50s they didn’t have a name. Born out of 1930s hard-boiled novels and...
