The Woodmans is a really interesting movie and also an uncomfortable mess, much like one of its subjects, and I don’t quite know how to go about reviewing it, or even describing how I reacted …

Albert Nobbs has two big secrets. One is that he’s socking away money, farthing by painstaking farthing, under a floorboard in the servant’s quarters, at the hotel where he works as a butler.
The other, and …

This is one of those “some friendships have a lifespan” problems, I suppose. Years ago, when I was at secondary school, I was friends with L. We were really close, but being teenagers we fell …

My esteemed colleague Couch Baron, blowing off The Artist with the combined force and economy of that air-puff glaucoma test you get at the eye doctor, described the film as, among other things, “so up …

Adaptations of Shakespeare: not for me. In fact, Shakespeare’s plays, page or stage: not for me. Shakespeare’s verse is a different story, and yes, I know he wrote the plays in verse, and yes, I…know. …

John Douglas has a line in The Cases That Haunt Us where he’s wrapping up the Lindbergh case, and after reviewing all the evidence, disputed and otherwise, he’s like, “So, did Hauptmann do it? I …

I don’t like musicals. I realize it’s ridiculous to complain that they come off stagey, but they do, and I don’t care for it.
But I do like the songs from musicals a lot of times …

William Poundstone is pretty good with a low-pH zinger. In Bigger Secrets, a book I’ve reread a hundred times thanks primarily to Poundstone’s “…seriously?” prose, he gives this account of Scientology’s handling of Hubbard’s death:
Finally …

“Why is magic still a secret in Edmonton? Good PR.”

I never get tired of the stories of the Apollo missions. Apollo 13, of course, is one of those poppy-fields movies that I can never not watch, and I think I put In the Shadow …