Widower's Tango

For Halloween I’m looking back at James Agee’s novel A Death in the Family , which I was reading in June until I reached the central event o...

It’s part of movie lore: when Noel Coward broke into movies in 1941, he was already adept at directing actors in dramas and comedies, but si...

John Cheever’s short story “The Swimmer” is about Neddy Merrill, a man who, for reasons unspecified (though likely the result of too much dr...

Lately I seem to be on a Woody Allen kick. As chance would have it, I wrote about the premiere of his film A Rainy Day in New York exactly ...

I’ve been reading Philip Roth’s novel The Human Stain for a few days. I know the plot, where the story is heading, but it didn’t prepare me...

A man is looking out of a window. We see only the back of his head as a voice, presumably his, delivers the following speech: I had dropped ...

From the sweetness of Intimate Lighting  to the bitterness of Cutter’s Way is a very long way to go. Czech filmmaker Ivan Passer defected t...