Archive

Because we live in an age of cheap cynicism and alleged sophistication, many viewers of Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon—nominated for two Academy Awards—will be inclined to adopt the stance...

When your parents were married for seventeen years before you were born, as mine were, you spend an awful lot of time scrutinizing scrapbooks, absorbing family lore, and trying...

We live in a nation in which marijuana use is tolerated, accepted, sanctioned, and even celebrated to a degree that would have shocked Americans not so long ago. Once,...

The United States is hooked on a regular regimen of pills, tablets, and capsules. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, during the years 2015–18 some 48.6 percent...

In an age when mass gatherings more often than not suggest the social upheaval of the last two years, it is helpful to be reminded that not all teeming...

The history of American cinema in the twen­tieth century is understood today as a march from inhibition to expression. The films produced during the long reign of the Motion...

When Stephen Sondheim died in late November at ninety-one, the eulogies, tributes, and bouquets from critics and ­tastemakers were entirely expected. The Broadway composer and lyricist left the Earth...

These days, the history of cinema is treated like the history of just about anything else: with a combination of neglect and ignorance, willful or otherwise. Just take a...

Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, who comprised the most consequential partnership in the history of American musical theater, were brought together by chance. It happened in the early...

One of the hoariest clichés of American popular culture is anti-suburban sentiment. Common throughout literature, film, and television, it arguably received its most tuneful expression in Malvina Reynolds’s 1962...