If horror films have lost their sting in recent years, it’s in large part because the easy availability of photographic equipment has put genuine horror so much in front of us that fiction seems tame by comparison. The films we saw on television of actual terrified fleeing peasants will linger in…
“Jesse James was a lad who killed many a man.” So went the opening line of the popular song, author unknown, that did much to spread the legend of Jesse Woodson James after his death on April 3, 1882—125 years ago today. Jesse and his brother Frank were already legends in their own time, but the…
Michael Wallis’s new book, Billy the Kid: The Endless Ride (W. W. Norton, 328 pages, $25.95), is the closest anyone has come to a definitive biography of the most mythical figure of the American frontier. On July 14, 1881, Billy the Kid was shot and killed by Pat Garrett in Fort Sumner, New Mexico…
Kal Penn, Irfan Khan, Sahiri Nair, and Tabu as the Ganguli family in The Namesake
Jhumpa Lahiri’s fiction has touched a nerve with readers on at least two continents. Most American fiction dealing with the immigrant experience has been written by the children of Jewish, Irish, or Italian parents…
James M. McPherson
James M. McPherson, the George Henry Davis ’86 Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University, is perhaps America’s foremost living Civil War scholar. Among his books are his one-volume history of the war, Battle Cry of Freedom, Lincoln and The Second American Revolution,…
Every now and then, and maybe even once a year if you’re lucky, you get a film that is so new—or at least that uses old themes and materials in so new a way—that it stays in your head for days. David Fincher’s Zodiac, about the frenzy that surrounded the Zodiac killer in the late 1960s and the…
Ryan Phillippe as a young FBI agent and Chris Cooper as the spy Robert Hanssen in Breach.
The second generation of America’s post–World War II intelligence experts—the ones who inherited the mantle from the WASPs depicted in Robert De Niro’s The Good Shepherd(which opened in December)—were mostly…
Matt Damon and Robert De Niro, who also directed, in The Good Shepherd. (Universal Pictures)
When it works, and it works for much of its two hours and 40 minutes, Robert De Niro’s The Good Shepherd feels like a film version of a John le Carré novel directed by Francis Ford Coppola. It’s about the…
Ken Watanabe, at right, plays General Kuribayashi in Letters From Iwo Jima.
There is no film director of our time whom the majority of critics want to more passionately line up behind than Clint Eastwood. Future generations of film students may puzzle over why they’re supposed to venerate such…
Sharon Stone and William H. Macy, husband and wife in Bobby.
It’s hard to imagine a stranger convergence of influences than have come together in Emilio Estevez’s Bobby. Who would have thought that so many actors (all of whom, apparently, worked in this film for less than their usual fees) were…
