newcritics

At 92, best-known now as Michael Douglas’ father and Catherine Zeta-Jones’ father-in-law, a movie legend is taking “an audit of my life” and, of course, doing it on stage and in front of cameras.
Kirk Douglas’ career is at the heart of a larger 20th century American story: how the children of refugees from European cruelty [...]

He was, in the view of magazine editors, the perfect New Yorker writer–a fount of elegant prose in every form over the Harold Ross and William Shawn postwar decades, a WASP outpost in the American mind being overrun by exotic Mailers, Bellows, Malamuds, Baldwins, Capotes and Kerouacs.
Those of us who came from an immigrant world [...]

Last night’s Golden Globe awards were another reminder that the Obama Generation can’t get enough of trashing the Fifties and early Sixties with “Revolutionary Road” and “Mad Men” just the latest examples.
This follows an election phenomenon noted by Joan Didion that “only the very young were decreed capable of truly appreciating the candidate. Again and [...]

The master of the meaningful pause dies on Silent Night, the artist of primal Jewish dread expires on Christmas eve–a Pinteresque moment in a time of turmoil.
For generations, starting with mine, Harold Pinter made art out of what was unsaid and unseen. His work took us out of the clatter and confusion of our daily [...]

She is as famous for movies she turned down as those she made and now, after years of retreat into real life, Debra Winger at 53 is back as a reminder that nothing is more erotic than beauty and brains.
Her disappearance inspired a documentary, “Searching for Debra Winger,” in which middle-aged Hollywood women pour out [...]

This week will feature a TV feast of his movies, showing the seriously sexy young stud of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” “The Long Hot Summer,” “The Hustler,” “Hud,” “Sweet Bird of Youth” and others that brought Paul Newman fame in his thirties.
But almost alone among superstars of our time (Clint Eastwood is [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

At 78, Tom Wolfe is being immortalized with the reissue of ten of his books in covers “designed to appeal to a new generation.”
But before he is embalmed as a writer of satirical novels like “Bonfire of the Vanities,” someone should remind readers how he helped change the face of American journalism and, in no [...]

The Fox Movie Channel showed “Gentleman’s Agreement” the other night, a preachy drama about anti-Semitism that won the Academy Award 60 years ago, and it brought into focus the realization that I may live to see a black man inaugurated as President of the United States.
What Barack Obama faces from now until November would be [...]

His name is on a Broadway marquee again this month with a musical version of “The Catered Affair,” one of his lesser works, but having Paddy Chayevsky back in any form is good for our culture.
In the second half of the 20th century, he almost single-handedly invented TV drama, then went on to theater and [...]

HBO has made John Adams a lot less lovable than Tony Soprano and, despite all the critical tiptoeing around it, picked a poor time to demythologize the making of the American miracle.
In this week’s next-to-last installment, a sour, surly Adams slips out of a half-finished, half-furnished White House to board a crowded jitney and avoid [...]

Richard Widmark, who died today at 93, made his movie debut in 1947 as a giggling psychotic who pushed a woman in a wheelchair down a flight of stairs in “Kiss of Death.”
Nominated for an Academy Award, he went on to play villains over next decade but, approaching middle age, his maturing prototypical American face [...]

Crimes against humanity come large now–wars, holocausts, ethnic cleansing–but sometimes a small horror rises from the past and pierces the heart. Such is the case of a man convicted last week of harvesting and selling body parts, including those of the most civilized man I ever knew.
For several generations of Americans, Alistair Cooke was the [...]

In an era of fake memoirs, Esquire now gives us a new variation on masturbatory journalism–the fictional diary.
For “a conceivable chronicle of Heath Ledger’s final days,” the editors explain, “writer Lisa Taddeo visited the actor’s neighborhood, talked to the store owners and bartenders who may have seen him during his last week, and read [...]

Between them, Lindsay Lohan (21) and Bert Stern (79) have inhabited planet Earth for a century, but all those years have not produced an iota of the good judgment it would have taken for them not to recreate “Marilyn Monroe’s Last Sitting” for New York Magazine this week.
Grave-robbing is rife in the celebrity world, but [...]

If Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama share a winning ticket, they could end up watching “Casablanca” together, but only if they can keep Bill Clinton from screening “American Beauty” all the time.
In the era of high-def home theaters and huge flat screens, White House movie-watching may be less special, but seeing a flick with the [...]

The Federal Communications Commission wants to fine ABC $1.4 million for airing an episode of “NYPD Blue” in 2003 showing a woman’s nude buttocks. The network owner, Walt Disney Company, will appeal.
In the sexual Dark Ages of my adolescence, teenagers would mark the hot passages of novels for the delectation of their peers. Now the [...]

Her wry smile and throaty voice remain. As Emily Hartley on the 1970s’ The Bob Newhart Show, she was the quintessential loving but skeptical wife in the kind of gentle comedy that is long gone from network TV.
A perfect partner for Newhart’s stammering psychologist, Suzanne Pleshette complemented his confusion with a sardonic sense of reality [...]

If he wrote “A Christmas Carol” today, Charles Dickens might take flak for insidiously promoting a welfare state that could lead to higher taxes and SCHIP programs for the likes of Tiny Tim.But after more than a century and a half, Scrooge and his ghosts will be all over TV this week without protest, except [...]

The Postal Service unveiled a Frank Sinatra stamp this week on what would have been his 92nd birthday. It was, of course, first-class.
For better and occasionally for worse, Sinatra provided the sound track for our romantic lives as the Greatest Generation went to war, morphing from a scrawny crooner mobbed by teen-age girls to middle-aged [...]

This weekend, a fine actor named Frank Langella is being seen in a new film, Starting Out in the Evening, which is getting good reviews in the New York Times, Rolling Stone and points between.
In it, Langella plays a writer and was directed by Andrew Wagner, a college classmate of one of my sons. Thirty [...]

He wanted to write The Great American Novel but changed the face of journalism instead. He died today at 84, leaving behind a torrent of words and an outsized public persona.
Norman Mailer was the opposite of shy. At a cocktail party, drink in hand, in front of a TV camera and, above all, on the [...]

The news from Hollywood is that Meryl Streep will be playing Julia Child in a new movie to be written and directed by Nora Ephron, which seems fair enough since Streep played Ephron in “Heartburn,” an autobiographical account of a food writer’s disastrous marriage.
I can horn in on this inbred arrangement with advice to Streep [...]

“Certain friendships,” Robert Redford once said about Paul Newman, “are too good and too strong to talk about.” This month, Redford broke his silence to say that the final movie they planned to make together was not to be:
“It’s not happening, sadly. Paul and I were planning to do a film version of Bill Bryson’s [...]

Those who have been watching the “Actors Studio” host interviewing movie stars for years will not be shocked to learn that, in an earlier incarnation, James Lipton worked as a facilitator in the world’s oldest profession.
In a new book, according to ABC, Lipton says that when he was “very very young, living in Paris, penniless, [...]

The woman who died this week was part of an American legend that will live forever in the Hollywood movies of the mid-twentieth century.
From the 1930s on, the studios there manufactured what John Updike has called “those gargantuan, crass contraptions whereby Jewish brains project Gentile stars upon a Gentile nation and out of the immigrant [...]

Before Vietnam, war movies were either gung-ho patriotic starring John Wayne or philosophically anti-war, starting with “All Quiet on the Western Front.”
This week the Los Angeles Times has been OpEding an argument prompted by a conservative’s contention that today’s Hollywood “stakes out an anti-victory position on the current war in Iraq, continuing its deplorable 40-year [...]

In 1949, I was almost thrown out of a theater for fits of laughter while watching the drama of an incorruptible architect who blows up a housing project because someone added gingerbread to his design.
The movie was “The Fountainhead,” based on an Ayn Rand novel with a script by the author, that set new records [...]

Twenty-five years ago today, Princess Grace of Monaco, just as Diana of Wales would 15 years later, died in a car crash, another victim of a Cinderella marriage that ended with shattered glass slippers.
Born Grace Kelly of Philadelphia, she was glowingly beautiful, as movies on TCM still show, and talented enough to win an Academy [...]

Brian De Palma has made a movie with images to “get the public incensed enough to get their congressmen to vote against the war.”
He calls it “Redacted” to emphasize what the mainstream media has edited out of America’s picture of the war in Iraq. De Palma uses blogs, YouTube posts, videologs on the [...]

The news today is that even reading has been politicized. A new poll finds one of every four Americans has not cracked a book in the past year, and that leads to a brouhaha about whether conservatives or liberals are the most avid readers.
Former Democratic Congresswoman Pat Schroeder, now president of the American Association of [...]

For a generation whose childhood was shaped by Hollywood movies, he opened the door to a new world of film as art. In the years after World War II, Bergman taught us how to think and feel and see in a new way.
He was an artist of images, but ideas were always there. All the [...]

© George Zimbel - UN Plaza taxi in the rain, 1955
In the 1950s, we began to see the world differently. A new generation of photographers was transforming frozen posed pictures into available-light images of people and places as they really were.
Those golden days of black-and-white photography are recalled in a new web site by one [...]

Anglophilia is hard to resist. Like a Hugh Grant-Richard Curtis movie, the British just can’t help charming us.
After politely following our lead into Iraq, they are now getting out in their understated way by quietly withdrawing their troops and disposing of Tony Blair.
Less stodgily, they are stoking nostalgia this weekend by re-creating Woodstock–music, mud and [...]