Ladies and Gentleman, Fellow Critics and Reviewers, Filmgoers and Movie Buffs on Land and at Sea: I here present my top pick as Best Picture Winner for the 2023 Oscars: The Fabelmans. As its punning title suggests, this film is kind of a fable. It’s also a Jewish family saga…

No fiction author from the last century has had the reach of mystery master Agatha Christie. She remains, by Guinness measures, the most popular fiction writer of all time. She was by no means a great, or even good, stylist, but she had a marked genius for plotting, characterization, and…

I love Christmas, but this holiday, after three years, five booster shots, and enough masking to inspire a late career switch to bank robbery, Covid at last smoked down the chimney to envelop the household. Twenty-twenty-two had its share of health issues already, and as I often found myself separated…

Since his debut in 2003, Martin McDonagh has been acclaimed as one of the English-speaking theatre’s most acclaimed playwrights. In 2008, he made a successful turn to filmmaking with In Bruges, a gleefully eccentric, funny, and touching black comedy that stands as my favorite hitman film. I passed on Seven…

When I was studying acting at the Fredric March Theatre at U. W. — Oshkosh in the mid-1970s, I heard a lot about “The Method” without learning too much about it and understanding even less. The name “Stanislavski” floated about. So did names like “Brando.” To me, the Method seemed…

Through most of twentieth-century American history, jazz music and organized crime were mostly seen as running along two separate tracks (except for anomalies like Frank Sinatra). …

Three Thousand Years of Longing is an often hypnotic, enchanting film, a glowing fantasy romance that offers a tantalizing look at humankind’s search for meaning and magic through storytelling. Based on a short story by A. S. Byatt, the film begins on a lowkey note with the contented life of…

I was the baby in my family by nearly ten years. Outside the family, I knew only a few kids my own age, and so I geared my little boy’s mind to the alleged grown-ups who towered and stormed around me. …

[Some mild spoilers . . . but if you haven’t seen any of Sam Peckinpah’s films, you have homework to do.] — Among the alarming number of artists and celebrities whose cards God has been pulling these last few months for his RIP file, three stand out as being linked in a remarkable way. Two of them are James Caan and the great English actor David Warner. The third name in this…