Like many denizens of Winesburg, Ohio, the fictional town in which the American writer Sherwood Anderson set his eponymous 1919 masterwork, Alice Hindman feels she has missed out on life—or at least an important part of it. After her lover …

My parents kept three numbers on speed dial: my aunt’s house, my father’s office and the Video Room, the movie rental place on 80th Street and Third Avenue. The Video Room catalogue was thick as a phone book and it …

As canonical controversies go, who wrote Shakespeare’s plays is the literary equivalent of who’s buried in Grant’s tomb—a question that answers itself and a bad joke that doesn’t improve with retelling. Thanks to Roland Emmerich, English professors can count on …

Note: This is a modified version of an article originally posted on The Niles Files, on October 9, 2011. George Clooney’s The Ides of March is about Hollywood, just as much—if not more so—as it is about insider politics. Clooney …

With the rumblings and portents of world’s end and apocalyptic speculation, The Tree of Life could not have arrived at a more opportune moment. Granted, it does not dwell on the End as much as it does the Beginning…

Like Hector, Will is at home with his beautiful wife and smiling young son. And like Hector, Will then chooses to return to war. But Will is not compelled to leave the city by fear for the safety of those he loves, or by the demands of honor. Rather he is drawn to the life he leads in conflict, allured by it.

The director of four films beginning with Badlands in 1973, Terrence Malick studied philosophy with Stanley Cavell at Harvard before abandoning a doctorate on Heidegger, Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein. A promising journalist and academic—as well as an outstanding high school football player—in …

The best word I’ve come across to describe David Cronenberg’s filmmaking style is “disembodied.” It was voiced as a criticism, but I think he’d own up to it. Whatever squelchy or peculiar or downright disgusting thing is going on in …

Astra Taylor is a gifted young filmmaker. Examined Life shows a keen visual imagination and a vivid sense of atmosphere and place. It also testifies to a personal passion for philosophy. What I shall say in criticism of the film …

Popular science is part of popular culture: our shelves teem with tomes that flatter and patronize us in equal measure, and every fallen senator is the victim of his genes. But what about popular philosophy? Is there a philosophical version …