newcritics

No live-blogging of tonight’s episode because of the holiday. Feel free to use this as an open thread.
I was an altar boy from the time I was in fifth grade until just about halfway through my first year of high school, when getting up at six o’clock on a Sunday morning became as physically [...]

Two nights ago, sitting in a small outdoor park hidden in the Wall Street area within view of New York Harbor, we saw Imitation of Life, a 1959 movie directed by Douglas Sirk.
Film experts like The Self-Styled Siren and NCYweboy can tell you all about the cinematography and the way different scenes work. But the [...]

BBC America has a new show for their Sci-Fi Saturday line-up called Primeval. I watched the three first episodes this past weekend, on demand on cable and on air, and was really impressed. The premise sounds a little silly, especially as it involves dinosaurs, but it seems to work.
Eight years ago, evolutionary zoologist Nick Cutter’s [...]

As fun as it is to get lost in, and quibble with, the exhaustive amount of period detail in Mad Men, that’s not quite where I come from on it. Right or wrong (or more to the point, right AND wrong), the period details of Mad Men are meant, I think, to frame the story [...]

Perhaps the most interesting, under-noted thing about Tropic Thunder is that it lacks women. There are no WAGs (Wives and Girlfriends) to muck up this war-buddy comedy, the only name actress to make a recognizable appearance I saw was Jennifer Love Hewitt, and that was 3 seconds, at the end (it’s the mildly amusing payoff [...]

Little, Brown missed the mark in subtitling Joe Nick Patoski’s absorbing new biography of Willie Nelson ‘An Epic Life’.
Willie’s story is more of a tall tale. Like Daniel Boone, Willie belongs both to American history and American myth. Huckster. Trickster. Philanthropist. Pothead. Road dog. Genius. His nicknames read like godly epithets of a peculiarly American [...]

Live blogging tonight!
“God, I miss the fifties.” Roger Sterling
“I miss the blacklist.” Harry Crane
“I missed not live blogging with you all last week. Thank God my Norwegian ancestors kept me from being sad about it.” M.A.Peel
Okay, so I have now seen “The Benefactor,” where Roger and Harry had throw away lines waxing nostalgic for [...]

With a crowd of family in tow in a sea of bustling fine art tourism, I took in the astounding Joseph Mallord William Turner retrospective at the Met last week, jostling through the headphone-wearers to gaze at a few of the finer works at some small length. Turner was an artist of empire, a [...]

The theme that developed quickly in the first season of Mad Men, that all the world’s a stage—particularly that part of the world that has its offices on Madison Avenue and split-level homes in Ossining, New York—and all the mad men and women merely unhappy and restless players trapped in soul-constricting roles of their own, [...]

This is Anne Bancroft Day on TCM, and they are showing her in movies ranging from Anne Sullivan, the determined teacher of deaf-and-blind Helen Keller in “The Miracle Worker” to the boozy Mrs. Robinson seducing Dustin Hoffman in “The Graduate.”
Before those triumphs, there was an unforgettable lunch with the young actress born Anna Maria Italiano [...]

As any Project Runway fan knows, the show has lost something. This season even Tim Gunn can’t make it work and I’m guessing Nina is beyond bored. I know I am. Claire and I were hoping we could muster up the enthusiasm to breathe life and excitement into PR’s last season on Bravo, but [...]

For all of today’s hypermobility of every kind—from the ubiquitous air travel we take for granted to the iphone culture that lets us take it all with us—we are a comparatively earth-bound people. I don’t think our society’s collective thoughts and imagination fly, not the way they did at the dawn of the sixties.
The National [...]

Some quick thoughts about new releases in heavy rotation around here….
 Say what you want about The Hold Steady–its songs adhere to formula;  the band’s a bunch of 30something,  retro classic rockers–the group’s appeal ain’t nostalgic and the new album Stay Positive is just plain excellent. Full of hooky, guitar driven rock songs with the kind [...]