Author’s note–this isn’t a review of the film, really. It’s a meditation spurred by seeing the film. If a critical judgment is implied by the nature of the meditation…c’est la vie. If some of my …

With the recent success of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds and last year’s Best Picture nomination for Stephen Daldry’s The Reader, there has been a resurgence of discussion surrounding how Hollywood depicts World War II in …

When I watch films, I don’t normally arrange my schedule around themes. I sometimes do auteur studies, but this division inevitably gets complicated when I hear of interesting things that jump the queue or want …

Originally delivered as an address to the Midwest Conference on Language, Literature and Media (MCLLM) in DeKalb, Illinois. 2 April 2005.

Here is a list of some of the films John Huston has directed which I have screened:
The Maltese Falcon (1941)
The Treasure of Sierra Madre (1948)
Key Largo (1948)
The African Queen (1951)
Moby Dick (1956)
The Misfits (1961)
The Bible: …

In Part I of this essay I opined that post-Romantic ideology in American and British literature had led to a general tendency to locate goodness in the individual and evil in institutions (that alternately tyrannize …