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In New York City today a strange spectacle is being staged: Theater artists are taking a stand against theater.
When the Lincoln Center Festival announced it was staging a four-night production this month that is subsidized by the state of ...
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Spider-Man: Homecoming Delivers the Goods
We’ve seen a lot of dark superhero movies (including most of the DC ones) and a lot of smarmy ones (Guardians of the Galaxy, Deadpool) in recent years. But rarely, these days, do the movies about men in tights ...
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Where in the World Is Bill de Blasio?
If there is a left-wing equivalent to “At least he made the trains run on time,” it must be, “At least he had the right idea about global warming.” New York’s aloof mayor, Bill de Blasio, is happy to ...
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Reagan Derangement Syndrome Is Alive and Well
To believe, in the 1980s, that Ronald Reagan was going to blow up the world may have been merely peculiar. To believe so today is a symptom of raging Reagan Derangement Syndrome. And yet here we are, with The Reagan ...
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Elizabeth Banks: Wrong on Spielberg, Wrong on Diversity
Is Steven Spielberg under some kind of moral or political obligation to make movies about women? The question arose last week when the actress and director Elizabeth Banks inexplicably blasted Spielberg while accepting one of those hooray-for-women honors (the Women ...
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Prog Rock: A Noble but Failed Experiment
To look at them, the gentlemen constituting Spinal Tap may strike you as heavy-metal musicians. The film of their strange odyssey, with its narrator “Marty DiBergi,” is formally modeled on The Last Waltz, “Marty” Scorsese’s documentary about The Band, ...
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Bob Dylan Bows to His Betters: Real Writers
Bob Dylan is not overly endowed with humility: “I was heading for the fantastic lights. No doubt about it,” he writes, describing his early days in New York City in his memoir Chronicles, Volume One. “But now destiny was about ...
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Bill de Blasio’s Middle Ground on Leftist Terrorism
This week New York City mayor Bill de Blasio provided an amusing display of how ideologically committed leftists who value their political viability try to map out an in-between position on left-wing terrorism.
It can’t be done. You either ...
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Kathy Griffin and Hillary Clinton: Wonder Women?
It’s been quite a week for Wonder Women. Every little girl who got a glimpse of TV news learned that she, too, can take a cue from a superhero and grow up as powerful and successful as her imagination ...
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Sgt. Pepper Wasn’t Even the Best Beatles Album of 1967
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band rewrote the rulebook of rock on its first release in the U.S. half a century ago, on June 1, 1967. It’s an exceptional, magnificent work, but it’s not even the finest Beatles ...
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The funniest episode in the protective yet revealing new Hillary Clinton profile arrives when we learn that this sad, unemployed, 69-year-old lady is so desperate to keep her self-image alive that she still employs flunkies and retainers to treat her ...
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Pirates of the Caribbean 5 — a Script in the Service of Visual Effects
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales is a toddler’s birthday party of a movie: Everything is happening but nothing means anything. The movie has no more of a soul than do the dozens of undead pirates ...
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Baywatch the Movie Is as Bad as Baywatch the TV Show
Here’s a big-screen adaptation whose source material no one will argue is sacrosanct: The film version of Baywatch is now bouncing into theaters, and it’s about as much fun as getting stung by a jellyfish or run over ...
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Roger Moore Was the Best Bond
It may be that the way things were in childhood will forever remain, for you, the way things ought to be. Roger Moore was my James Bond, the Seventies 007, and for me there can be no other.
Moore, who died ...
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Bill de Blasio Will March Behind a Terrorist
That the mayor of America’s largest city is planning to march with a convicted terrorist in next month’s Puerto Rican Day Parade illustrates a fundamental fact about the Left in America: From student activists all the way up ...
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Boredom vs. Chaos in The Commune
‘I’m bored.” Those two words are all it takes to begin the dismantling of a settled bourgeois family in The Commune, a subtly devastating new film from the Danish writer-director Thomas Vinterberg. It makes apparent the relative attractiveness of ...
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Guy Ritchie’s Swaggering King Arthur
The British director Guy Ritchie made his name with the swaggering 1998 film Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, about smack-talking Cockneys plotting London capers, and with the new King Arthur: Legend of the Sword he proves pleasingly able to adapt ...
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Let’s not underplay this: Emma Watson just became the Rosa Parks of today’s Hollywood.
Declining to honor gender demarcations just as Parks once declined to observe racial ones, Watson, holding a goofy simulacrum of a bucket of popcorn, ...
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Her Chelseaness: How to Be Entitled and Boring without Really Trying
Chelsea Victoria Clinton was named after the Joni Mitchell song “Chelsea Morning,” and as of the spring of 2017, it’s Chelsea Morning in America. Boom, she’s in Variety . . . CBS This Morning . . . The New York Times Book Review. She even ...
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Silicon Valley’s Erlich Bachman Is a Capitalist Hero
It has been reported that there are two types of Silicon Valley folk who watch Silicon Valley: Those who watch it for the dead-on accuracy and those who can’t bear to watch it for the dead-on accuracy.
Week after ...
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Bret Stephens Gives Climate-Change Alarmists Advice, and the Left Erupts
Ordinarily when war breaks out between the activist Left and the New York Times, the conservative impulse is not to delve too deeply into the substance of the dispute but rather to inquire about the availability of refreshments: When the ...
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You May Be Wrong about Billy Joel
This is what happens at a Billy Joel concert at Madison Square Garden: Thousands of gyrating white people from the suburbs have a wonderful time, and one or two frowning music critics (also white, also probably from the suburbs) grind ...
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Bill Nye, the Scientism Guy
If you loved Bill Nye the Science Guy, do yourself a favor and don’t call up the kiddie entertainer’s new Netflix show Bill Nye Saves the World. Bitter, angry, shouty, conspiratorial, vulgar, wheedling, given to absurd hyperbole, and ...
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The Dystopian World of The Handmaid’s Tale Bears No Resemblance to Trump’s America
The fulsomely praised new Hulu series The Handmaid’s Tale, which is available for streaming starting tomorrow, takes place in a chilling near-future where women are reduced to wombs on feet, gays are publicly executed, and a Christian theocracy has ...
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Why Colin Kaepernick’s Protest Failed
L’Affaire Kaepernick is winding down with humiliating defeat facing those athletes, and the jock-sniffing courtiers surrounding them, who publicly disrespected the American flag. About all that is left is for the losers to complain that the winners are hypocrites.
...
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Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to the Savages
The Lost City of Z takes us to the Amazon jungle in the Edwardian years, a savage wilderness of irrationality, hostility, and incandescent loathing for outsiders. It’s almost as bad as the Middlebury campus today.
I make the comparison ...
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Dave Eggers’s Prescient Vision of Progressive Dictatorship
Late in The Circle, Dave Eggers’s 2013 novel set in a near-future that is both staggering and entirely too plausible, the Google-like tech company referred to in the title proposes a small brand extension: Its next goal is to conquer ...
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Don’t Give Nate Parker an Academy Award
Is there a morals clause to anything anymore? The question is relevant when it comes to the upcoming Oscar campaign for Nate Parker, the writer/director/star of The Birth of a Nation, which instantly became a frontrunner in the ...
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On Thursday I had the strange honor of finding myself denounced, by name, in a full-page color ad placed on page C5 of the New York Times. A humble movie critic rarely finds himself the object of so much excited ...
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U.K. Government Employing Human Alarm Clocks
From the Daily Mail:
Carl Cooper thought he was doing a public service by offering seven benefits claimants the chance to work for him.
But the company boss was flabbergasted when none of them turned up on the ...
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Who’s Afraid of Sinclair Broadcast Group? John Oliver
The Right is gaining more platforms to deliver its take on the news, and this trend is posing a danger to the historically unbiased, nonpartisan, straight-down-the-middle reporting of the major media. Who says so? Why, John Oliver.
His fans are ...
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In Chicago, Thought-Police Brutality
In Chicago, where there were more homicides last year than in Los Angeles and New York City combined, expressing any support whatsoever for the police is now considered an outrage. Should you point out that, say, a play seems to ...
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Inside the Delightful Suicide of Gawker
In the history of giving a hostage to fortune, John Cook, a former editor of the former online poison party known as Gawker, merits a special place. He has this to say about his professional aims: “I wanted to write ...
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The Big Sick Isn’t Big Enough
In the 1970s, every suburban couple shared the same dread: that they’d be invited over to another couple’s house to watch a slideshow of vacation photos. Invariably the guests would discover that their hosts couldn’t leave anything ...
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America Stands United in Hating Katy Perry
For the better part of a decade, Katy Perry filled a historic role in American culture: the national sexy ditz. Like Marilyn Monroe, Suzanne Somers, and Jenny McCarthy before her, she discovered the colossal upside to being dumb, beautiful, and ...
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Lefty Actors Are Beginning to Fear Donald Trump
Over the weekend the arts community stepped a little too close to the flame of their hatred for President Trump. They got singed, and by Sunday night they were backing away, looking confused and hurt.
The New York theater scene ...
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A Trump-ified Julius Caesar
Who is this ancient, yet curiously familiar, character we see before us each evening at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park? He’s said to be Julius Caesar, but he has a business suit, a white shirt, an overcoat, an ...
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There’s Still Life in The Mummy
In the land of blinding sunshine, the high priests have used the dark unguents of the embalmer to preserve the ancient bodies of the royals in an uncanny state of youthful freshness. Which is why, I guess, Tom Cruise still ...
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At the New York Times, a Public Execution
‘Democracy dies in darkness,” declares the Washington Post, in a line that Dean Baquet, editor of the rival New York Times said, not inaccurately, “sounds like the next Batman movie.” Now the Times has joined the WaPo in dumping its ...
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Is Wonder Woman Overrated?
One takes note of the many encomia for Wonder Woman with a modicum of skepticism. Could film critics — virtually all of them ardent progressives — be grading on a curve, the way the Army gives women two and a half more ...
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With its inherent contradictions and absurdities, war has always provided satirists with a target-rich environment. Fighting men themselves have a keenly developed sense of black comedy and love to joke about futility, the opaque nature of military jargon, the obliviousness ...
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The Pathetic Journey of ‘Mattress Girl’ Emma Sulkowicz
An especially acute headline in The Onion once proclaimed, “Marilyn Manson Now Going Door-to-Door Trying to Shock People.” It’s an addictive thing, fame, and when it no longer need have any connection to talent, it can seem available for ...
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The Enduring Appeal of Evelyn Waugh
Evelyn Waugh’s friend and fellow novelist Nancy Mitford once wrote of his sense of humor: “Even his close friends were not spared. He criticized everyone fiercely and was a terrible tease, but he set about it in such an ...
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Chelsea Manning Is Not a Whistleblower
Let’s say you published something controversial on the Internet and you started getting death threats. How would you like being “doxed”? In other words, what would your reaction be if someone who didn’t like you tweeted out to ...
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Get Ready for the Pillorying of Pence
Should Mike Pence become president, the Left will surely lead us in a national chorus of “Whew! Back to normal.” Correct? After all, our friends in the Democratic party have been saying for many months that President Trump is not ...
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Why Saturday Night Fever Wouldn’t Be a Blockbuster Today
In the closing minutes of Saturday Night Fever, the following events occur: A racist injustice, an attempted date rape, a gang rape, a horrific accidental death with an element of suicide, and (not least) a nighttime ride on the disco-era ...
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The Birth of Hollywood Virtue-Signaling
Fifty years ago, a pathbreaking year for American cinema arrived. Two generation-defining films unlike anything anyone had seen before — Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate — challenged critics with new depths of irony and previously unseen layers of subtlety. “The big ...
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As a Nazi, President Trump has proved lackluster. The brownshirts and concentration camps that Hollywood types warned us to expect haven’t materialized. As an authoritarian, too, Trump is falling short of expectations: When judges defy his executive orders, he ...
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The World Roger Stone Helped Create (or So He’d Have You Believe)
Roger Stone began his career in political dirty tricks young. In 1960, he was eight, and decided he liked John F. Kennedy’s hair more than Richard Nixon’s. It was important to him for Kennedy to win the mock election ...
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Courage and Cowardice in the Vietnam War’s Final Hours
What everyone knows about the Vietnam War is that it was unwinnable, that the South Vietnamese didn’t much want us there, and that our military involvement was a moral outrage that did us all deep dishonor.
We know all ...
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Star-Lords of the Idiocracy
Everyone said Guardians of the Galaxy was a great movie and everyone was, as usual, wrong. I thought it only sporting to give Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 a try, but it’s exactly the same kind of thing and ...
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It’s fitting that Dan Rather is best known for bringing to the world a piece of fake news about George W. Bush’s Air National Guard service in Texas, because that’s where he began his career in shoddy ...
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Bill de Blasio’s Pre-Pre-K Fantasy
In New York City’s government-run education system, as a general rule, you can guess how bad the school is by how grand and imposing its name is. At the High School for Law and Community Service in the Bronx, ...
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Lena Dunham’s Ultimately Conservative Message
Lena Dunham’s ultimate message in Girls is conservative: a lesson in the cost of flouting bourgeois norms.
To put in perspective the magnitude of what Lena Dunham has accomplished with her HBO sitcom Girls, imagine that Michael Jackson had ...
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The Jewel of Conservatism in The Crown
Netflix’s superb drama The Crown may appear on the surface to be merely another lush historical soap opera for the sort of person who cried while watching Princess Diana’s wedding. But in fact, the series, which promises to ...
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Paul McCartney’s Neglected Masterpiece
Unlike John Lennon, the chronic oversharer avant la lettre, Paul McCartney has always been guarded about his interior life, rarely using his songs to deliver the gossip about what it’s like being Paul McCartney. For McCartney, the entertainer’s ...
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Deepwater Horizon and Everyday Heroes
The climactic images of an American flag rippling against darkness and fire in the brilliant new film Deepwater Horizon recall many a war film, or indeed the writing of The Star Spangled Banner itself, near Fort McHenry as the War ...
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School Reformers Fight Back against de Blasio
These are the 194 Harlem children who have been kicked out of their beloved school by New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio.
Thursday they starred in a full-page New York Times advertisement that seemed like the cap to a very ...
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Olympian Self-Seriousness
It’s that orotund opening theme song that drags you into watching the Olympics, that inescapable Cecil B. DeMille bombast suggesting Vulcan beating a kettle drum. Bum-bum-ba-BUM-BUM-bum-bum-ba-BUM-BUM. Battle stations! Ramming speed! Associations rush to mind — the classical splendor, the brotherhood ...
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In the 1990s, NFL football seemed about to sink into a mini–dead-ball era of wily defense. Such was the skill of kickers that short- and medium-distance field-goal attempts became nearly always successful. They also grew far too frequent. In 1993, ...
