newcritics

New DVD alert: Payday, the 1972 movie that many people consider Rip Torn’s greatest role, is now available in rental stores and through Netflix. Directed by Daryl Duke, Payday is a “lost movie” that was well received by critics at the time but overshadowed in theaters by crowd-pleasers like The Godfather, Deliverance, Cabaret, [...]

On August 1, 2007, a one of the greatest runs in journalism came to an end when the family owners of The Wall Street Journal sold the company to Rupert Murdoch.
Newcritics readers don’t need a review of Murdoch’s vile track record—if you read or listen to modern media, you feel his clammy touch.
This brief [...]

A few weeks ago I found a first edition hard-cover of Stuart Dybek’s I Sailed With Magellan in a bin of unwanted books selling for a dollar apiece. A week later, Dybek won the Macarthur Foundation “Genius” award, worth $500,000, and on its heels, the 2007 Rea Award for the Short Story, worth $30,000.
Dybek’s artistic [...]

Romance & Cigarettes, a movie probably not coming soon to a theater near you, is a messy, juicy stew of a movie about sexual lust—the kind that upends marriages and, in the words of Muddy Waters, “makes a preacher put his bible down.” It also happens to be over-the-top hilarious.
Written, directed, and completed by John [...]

I have been listening to Superfly, the movie soundtrack album by Curtis Mayfield, since it was released in 1972, and loving it every time I hear it. The album tells a gritty, bittersweet story that I have imagined, start to finish, countless times in my head. A Harlem cocaine dealer tries to “get over,” and [...]

Yesterday I took a day off work to see Sweet Smell of Success (1957), one of my all-time favorite movies. Starring Burt Lancaster as the virulent newspaper columnist J.J. Hunsecker and Tony Curtis as the lapdog press agent Sidney Falco, the film famously bombed at the box office but is now generally considered a [...]

Sebastian Faulks has made a name for himself in the UK as a best-selling writer of historical sagas (Birdsong, Charlotte Gray). But his reputation is mixed: He doesn’t have the cachet of an Ian McEwen, Julian Barnes, or Martin Amis, and some critics sniff that his work verges toward sentimentality, or worse: his Charlotte Gray [...]

Bruce Weber has made a career out of fetishizing the human body as a photographer of homoerotic art books, Calvin Klein’s “Obsession” advertising, and the Abercrombie & Fitch catalogs. His photographs seem to embody anonymous sex, a style that lends itself well to commercials, with their promise of immediate gratification. In Let’s Get Lost, Weber’s [...]

“The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.”
–F. Scott, Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Has anyone in love with New York City not been enthralled by its bridges–whether from above, below, or speeding across [...]

What’s this? Philip K. Dick has been admitted to the pantheon. Four of his novels will be re-issued by the Library of America, alongside American masters such as Melville, Hawthorne, Roth, et al.

As a longtime fan who for decades has bent people’s ears about the literary merit of Philip K. Dick, I am as proud today as if a good friend were chosen for this honor. With one major misgiving: The Library ignored three of his very best books.

The Library chose four mainstream Dick novels: “The Man in the High Castle”, “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch”, “Ubik”, and “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”. The latter three are excellent choices. (The first, “Man in the High Castle” is an odd choice, given it was one of Dick’s early novels and not his strongest.) But for some reason, the Library dismissed the trilogy he completed near the end of his life: the so-called VALIS trilogy (VALIS, The Divine Invasion, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.

The reason why is probably best summarized in a recent New York Times article, in which Charles McGrath dismissed the VALIS trilogy as Dick’s “Finnegan’s Wake—a book that’s more fun to talk about than to read.”