I. Joan Didion, after several years of not covering the civil rights movement, did so in an essay called “Black Panther.” She was not entirely impressed by Huey Newton. …

I’d long postponed reading Joan Didion because, of all the so-called New Journalists who started writing in the United States in the 1960s, she seemed to pay the least attention to the civil rights movement. It seemed something of an odd topic for a writer of that time to sit…

Sidney Lumet’s Q & A works as a piece of drama whether a viewer, having seen the first half-hour, thinks that the protagonist is every bit the a choirboy he seems to be, or if they are convinced that he couldn’t be as free of prejudice and bias as all…

Q & A does not rank among Sidney Lumet’s most prestigious films, though given the quality of his output, that is not an indictment of the movie itself. …

When I was a child, my father moved from Chicago to upstate New York and bought a Pontiac Grand Prix which his carrying case for cassettes almost never left. His taste, as reflected by the tapes, seemed to run mostly to artists like James Ingram and Bruce Hornsby. I’m not…

In 2003, in the United States, I went to university. After sunset one night, deep in autumn, I wandered down to the lounge of my residence hall and fell into a game that was already in progress. A handful of men and one woman were naming a succession of movies…

When sending off a novel to literary agents, a writer is usually encouraged to list, in their cover or “query” letter, between one and three comparable titles that have been published in the last few years. …

I don’t know how many times I watched Set It Off as a kid. Certainly more than I can count. There’s a real joy to going back to a movie you’ve loved, having regained unawareness of how it ends. …

Giovanni Russonello covers in the New York Times the release of a new poll from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and the Interfaith Youth Core, according to which 15% of Americans agree with the statement, “The government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. …