Suppose Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib are not merely momentary aberrations, but rather preludes to even stronger responses to the threat of terrorism. After all, in a very short time, we’ve become used to teams of guards in black coveralls carrying automatic rifles as they patrol our airpor

Thirty-plus years of doing this column have given me quite a high tolerance for awful stuff, but Apocalypto nearly beat me. After an hour, it took sheer will power to keep me in my seat. Yes, most early reviews of the film have been positive, but not ecstatic, so perhaps the problem rests in the eye

The Departed is a puzzling name for Martin Scorsese’s remake of the Hong Kong crime action movie “Infernal Affairs” (Lau and Mak, 2002). The term generally refers to dead people. As the film progresses through its two-and-a-half-hour tour of the mean streets of working-class Boston

One scene in Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center encapsulated the entire film for me. A distraught wife of a missing police officer runs out into the street in front of her home after waiting all day for some news of her husband. The September evening sparkles with lights glowing through the win

Dr. T. J. Eckleburg’s eyes, an optometrist’s billboard on the road to Jay Gatsby’s mansion, stared patiently out over the Jazz Age, without blinking, without judgment, without tears. In their pitiless observation of America drowning in its own bootleg liquor and easy money, the eye

In all probability more people have read Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code in its Farsi translation than have read all my publications put together. No wonder. It is splendid junk, and I mean that as a positive remark, sort of. Brown has a flawless sense of his genre, and the book delivers exactly

Plastic chairs and paper cups, laptops and cell phones: the depersonalizing symbols of air travel. Baseball hats and tee-shirts. Boarding passes spit out of machines at the beckoning of a credit card. The herding into lines by airport and airline personnel clearly bored with their jobs and annoyed b

Brokeback Mountain received one of the most enthusiastic receptions of any film released this past year. The pony had scarcely left the barn before reviewers filled its saddlebags with potential Oscars. They seemed almost afraid to corral their enthusiasm. Why should such a competent but really quit

My presence at a midday meeting a few weeks ago was not essential. Surely, other demands on my time were more pressing, but for some strange reason as the campus carillon struck noon, even though I’d be a few minutes late, for some inexplicable reason, I decided to put in an appearance. I open

Syriana provides a valuable insight, one of those “Aha!” moments. Before sitting through this new film, brilliantly written and directed by Stephen Gaghan, I held the rather conventional belief that the news from the Middle East was relentlessly depressing because of the horrible events