newcritics

Because Jon Swift is a nominee for Funniest Blog in the 2007 Weblog Awards, I often get asked, “What’s funny?” Of course, nothing makes comedy funnier than to explain it. I often find that I don’t get a lot of jokes until someone explains why they are funny, and sometimes not even then. According to [...]

Obituaries for film directors Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman hailed them as cinematic giants. Bergman was called “probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera” who brought “metaphysics - religion, death, existentialism - to the screen.” Antonioni, we were told, “challenged moviegoers with an intense focus on [...]