Movies
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The Business Trip
In the film, a father’s arrest is disguised from his young son as a “business trip.” In my own family, the euphemism wasn’t far off — an uncle who told the wrong joke simply vanished from Belgrade, and turned up months later on Goli Otok, a barren island where Tito’s regime sent its “enemies” to…
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A Tunnel Through the Black Death
A haunting medieval odyssey carries villagers from the Black Death into a modern world they could never have imagined.
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Star-Crossed
Nearly every great Frank Capra film was really a two-man act — Capra’s ideas, Riskin’s words, a partnership as gifted as Lennon and McCartney’s and, in the end, just as doomed. What broke it wasn’t politics, even though the two men stood on opposite sides of it. It was ego — and by the time…
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Drip, Baby, Drip: Jackson Pollack and the Paint Machine
In the old comedy “What a Way to Go!,” every man Shirley MacLaine marries strikes it rich by some freak chance, then dies, leaving her alone again. One of them, played by Paul Newman, is a painter with a machine that splatters canvases in time to music — a joke that isn’t as far from…