David Thomson on Films: 'White Material'
David Thomson on Films: 'The Way Back'
It is 1940, somewhere in Soviet-occupied Poland. A Pole is being interrogated; he has been beaten. Then a woman is called in, his wife; some torture has degraded her. She informs on her man; he will be sent to a gulag. The horror is clear, but the feeling is everyday and commonplace. As someone else will admit later in the film, we have all done terrible things. READ MORE >>
David Thomson on Films: 'True Grit'
Feel-Good Noir
This is what happens. In Boston, four masked thugs, with naked automatic weapons, rob a bank. In the process they compel a young woman employee to open the time-locked vault. I say young because the actress playing the “bank manager,” Rebecca Hall, is twenty-eight, which seems a little raw for that job. (Or am I just sentimental about banks?) But wait, there are greater implausibilities to come. READ MORE >>
Demon Dog or Faithful Retriever?
Fudging Holly Golightly
Chinamen
Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and his Rendezvous with American History By Yunte Huang (W.W. Norton, 354 pp., $26.95) READ MORE >>
Chinamen
Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and his Rendezvous with American History By Yunte Huang (W.W. Norton, 354 pp., $26.95) READ MORE >>
Where Does Ethan Edwards Go?
In 2008, Robert Pippin, professor of Social Thought and Philosophy at the University of Chicago, delivered the Castle Lectures at Yale. They now form the basis of a book with a forbidding picture of John Wayne as Ethan Edwards (from The Searchers) on the cover. So this is a university press book on “Political Philosophy,” but it is a movie book, too. That at least is the hope; Yale University Press is asking $35 for it. READ MORE >>
