newcritics

As we all know, Project Runway is in its 5th and final season on Bravo, with word out that it will be moving to its new home at Lifetime for its next run. I have mixed feelings about this. I have mixed feelings in general when it comes to Project Runway and the course it [...]

I wasn’t expecting to join in the weekly blogfest over Mad Men, mostly because with my lack of cable, I’ll be at a certain disadvantage. As it turns out, though, AMC is
making episodes pretty quickly available on iTunes, and the chance to rejoin something I was getting a pretty big kick out of turned [...]

It is particularly tempting for me to relish the details of style and fact embedded in the non-drama that unfolds Sunday evenings as Mad Men, particularly in this new second season launch tonight. The ad boys return on Valentine’s Day, 1962 - exactly a week before my arrival in the New York suburbs of that [...]

The question of whether Brideshead Revisted is better now or in the fondly remembered 1981 TV version
is the wrong question, as it turns out. Perhaps the film’s best recommendation is that, approached fairly, it renders the comparisons moot. And perhaps that, in itself is proof of its success.
If only things were quite so simple.
Brideshead [...]

When last we saw the enigmatic Don Draper, he was sitting on the bottom of his living room steps on Thanksgiving, 1960; his wife and children have gone to her Dad’s for the holiday. He didn’t want to go, since he’s not really participating in his marriage or his fatherhood. But he was affected by [...]

I’m going to write several negative thoughts about a movie that I liked. A movie that I’m sure most of you really loved. If that’ll bother you because you must be so serious about The Batman, please click away so your delicate psyches are not damaged for all eternity.
Heath Ledger was good. [...]

Let me first start with an apology. Jennifer and I were perfectly aware that the Bravo’s final season of Project Runway started last night. Perfectly aware. But life got in our way, and somehow beat out Heidi Klum in our list of priorities. But for the sake of our audience (and [...]

Chris Nolan’s epic Batman sequel, The Dark Knight, is modern Gothic eye candy of the highest order. Shot in IMAX and best seen that way, the movie is a dizzy-making thrill ride replete with centrifugal tracking shots and a blue black palette that mirrors the darkness of the movie’s soul: It’s a Hollywood superhero movie [...]

Here we go again with another shot of surrealism, this time courtesy of The Leningrad Cowboys with The Red Army Choir. You have to see this to believe it, and even then it is hard to reconcile with reality.

Just in case you missed Part I.

A London gallery next week will show pictures of an American legend, some of them unseen for almost half a century. Taken by my friend Marvin Koner, they show, not the familiar man in black with a life-scarred face, but a smooth-skinned 27-year-old at the brink of a career that would sear his voice and [...]

Jo Stafford died on Wednesday. May she rest in peace in a heaven of beautiful, sultry music. My parents had a compilation album that had her “You Belong to Me,” and it was the first adult song that I learned all the words to when I was very young.
She had that agile, clear, distinctive voice, [...]

We’ve just closed a fantastic five-part film series hosted by Lance Mannion here at newcritics, some of the best live-blogging we’ve had since our launch 18 months ago - but it was also interrupted by a hacker-induced breakdown of the site’s infrastructure. And that reminded me that we needed to improve or perish, so we [...]

Ok, get your hands up and don’t turn around. It’s Wednesday Night at the Movies again here at newcritics. Empty your pockets of comments and nobody’ll get hurt.
Few thoughts to mull over while we wait to get started. First, here’s part of a post I wrote way back in April when I [...]

A friend and I joked that a lot of Angelina Jolie movies blend into one - you know, the one where she plays the tough badass… spy… who uses a lot of… knives and stuff… while wearing kickass outfits…

Quick, name the movie.
At this stage of her career, Jolie gives great movie star; that’s [...]

After an attack by “malware” hackers last week, newcritics looked more like Bonnie & Clyde’s bullet-sliced sedan than the functioning cultural colossus that it is has been over the past year and half. Well, the site’s back up, folks, and it seems like most of the data is intact. Finger crossed, of course. A huge [...]

Tracy was dying. Everybody working on Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner knew it. His heart was failing, his liver, his lungs. He was 68 years old. Same age Harrison Ford is now. But while Ford moves through Kingdom of the Crystal Skull as if he was 15, 20 years younger, [...]