“Sayles’s 1996 film, Lone Star, is arguably his greatest work to date. And after 25 years, given the tensions that continue to circle around issues of race and immigration, it certainly has not lost any of its original force and relevance.”
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Category: Criticism
Toward a Politics of Reconciliation: John Sayles’s “Lone Star,” after 25 Years
On the Eve of His Comeback, James Bond Resonates for a Reason
“Young Americans, myself included, need to resist the impulses of the day and keep striving. We may never be Bond types, but the quest for self-improvement is the point. To strive is to live.”
Flyover Blues: The Enduring Relevance of F. Scott Fitzgerald
“One hundred years after Fitzgerald’s great novels, we are living in the same world as Nick Carraway, Amory Blaine, and Jay Gatsby.”
Review: Louis Menand’s “The Free World”
“In many ways, the book also reads as a eulogy to a liberal, liberalizing, and internationalist America.”
The Two-faces of Classical Music: Criticism Good, Bad, and Ugly
“Why, after all, should it be ‘pro-test,’ and not ‘de-test’? Protest once meant to give testimony in pro of something good, over and against something corrupt.”
Sir Roger Scruton’s Wagner
“Scruton loved Wagner. The two were a match made in heaven, or hell, depending on your perspective and appreciation of irony.”
Virgil’s War and Peace
“Two millennia later, we are still warring over the meaning of Virgil’s Aeneid.”
Odysseus: the First Western Man
“Odysseus is the first recognizably Western man.”
In Every Time and Every Place: the Political Nuance of “Legend of Galactic Heroes”
“This is not a clear-cut struggle between good and evil, especially when enemies could come from within as well as without. Rather…it is a war between one good and another.”
How “Ms .45” and Zoë Lund Paved Abel Ferrara’s Way
“In the end, these are movies about redemption and what it means to be redeemed, whatever the struggle in getting there.”
Review: Michael Shnayerson’s “Bugsy Siegel”
“It is a short and gripping panorama of life in 1920s-1940s America, that defining epoch of struggle and stardom, hardship and grandeur, fortune and bankruptcy—and Bugsy Siegel experienced it all.”
Review: Jan Swafford’s “Mozart: The Reign of Love”
“The problem is that this story of Mozart that we think we know is not true at all; thankfully, Jan Swafford is here to correct the problem.”
Review: “The Klondike Bake-Oven Deaths”
“In a novel to be released later this month, Hornblum—perhaps best known for his 1998 non-fiction book Acres of Skin, which centers on different events at Holmesburg Prison—retells the calamitous events of August, 1938.”
What Ortega y Gasset and Orwell Both Foresaw
“Both Ortega and Orwell concluded that the Left was in trouble as a result of these developments, and their analyses and diagnoses pointed the way forward to the situation we have today in the West.”
The Moral Philosophy of Plutarch
“While not all of his essays are explicitly moral in orientation, nearly all of Plutarch’s essays have moral instruction and guidance baked into them.”
