I haven’t paid particular attention to Tom Cruise throughout his thirty-plus year career. Thanks to a blinding grin visible from the moon, his stardom is undeniable. Still, I’ve never been able to embrace him as I have other stars, some of whom are lesser actors. Like many great movie stars…

Though it thrives most everywhere else around the globe, Thoroughbred horse racing is the sick man of American sports. The “Sport of Kings” was once as popular as baseball, more popular than football. Nowadays, American racetracks, some of the most beautiful sports stadiums anywhere, feel like haunted palaces on most…

The Duke is both caper comedy and underdog story. On its surface, it resembles one of those inspirational tracts about a plucky outsider’s battle against great odds and greater enemies where he emerges at the end, arms raised, doing his triumph pirouette. (You know I’m thinking Rocky.) These movies are…

“The past is a foreign country,” an English novelist named L. P. Hartley wrote. Indeed, short of a working time machine, even the best historians and artists can never fully immerse us in the past or make us feel what it was really like to be alive way back when. …

It may not be a great movie, but it’s easy to admire and enjoy Everything Everywhere All at Once (now streaming on Amazon) as a funhouse genre-bender through our addle-headed, anxious and dangerously confused era. The film is a head-trip, a Hong Kong-style, action comedy of intruding and conflicting realities…

As this year’s Oscar telecast approached, my handicapper’s intuition, honed by years of experience, told me The Power of the Dog would win Best Picture. I’d barely heard of the eventual winner, CODA. But now that I’ve seen it, it’s clear why Academy voters gave it the top prize. CODA…

For many people, life in the third decade is glorious and exciting, electric with adventure and promise. Many young adults know exactly what they want. Their road to tomorrow runs clear and straight, never mind the obstacles and the disappointments. As Shakespeare well put it, “They know not seems.” There…

In this era of excess, The Outfit stands apart as a pleasingly stripped down, tightly woven crime drama, set on a single night on a single set, featuring a small menagerie of characters caught in a deadly dispute, all of it sewn up in less than two hours. We’re in…

[Again, with feeling, a repeat of a column I occasionally update about why I stopped watching the Oscars, why it matters only to the Academy members, plus my adventures as a wannabe, neverwas screenwriter.] ONCE UPON A TIME ON THE TV From the mid-1980s to 2007, I watched the Academy…