Review: Josie Rourke’s ‘Mary Queen of Scots’
“Dramatic license is so much a given that discussions of authenticity are as damned as they are damning.”
Losses Made in Heaven: Martin Scorsese’s ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ and ‘Casino’
“In Scorsese’s inversion of the downfall, paradise isn’t the origin and its loss doesn’t mean moral decrepitude, only mediocrity.”
What I Learned from Martin Scorsese’s ‘Life Lessons’
“Martin Scorsese’s ‘Life Lessons’ benefits more from analysis as a self-standing artistic expression than as a counterpoint to the other installments of ‘New York Stories.'”
Why Criticism: Joan Didion, John Wayne and Personal Brands
A Column on Film Criticism by Justine A. Smith
‘Whiskey Tango Foxtrot’: Empty Empowerment
“It’s not a bad movie, but no matter how long it spends in the war zone, it still feels like a tourist.”
His Blazing Automatics: You and Me and the Devil Makes Three – The Religious Allegory of Craig Zobel’s ‘Z for Zachariah’
A Weekly Column by Dylan Moses Griffin