Perhaps around the time that New Yorker critic David Denby published “My Life as a Paulette,” in which he described how the late film critic first mentored him and then wrote him off as “not really a writer,” I lost my taste for Pauline Kael. Not because of her dismissal of Denby — if I’ve […]
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The First Sign: An Introduction of Sorts
February 18, 2016 in
For the last decade, I have lived in a Brooklyn neighborhood in which I have to move my car on Tuesday mornings. If I time it right, the whole ritual is pleasing in a grim sort of way. At 9:28 am, I zoom my car out of the 9:30-11:00 am no-parking zone and into a […]
An Interview With David Thomson
September 18, 2014 in Book Matters, Film Matters
This interview was originally published in Word and Film. This year marked the release of the sixth edition of David Thomson’s New Biographical Dictionary of Film, published for the first time in 1975. Now at 1,154 pages long, the book isn’t just a reference manual. It’s an exotically rare bird, with more than 1,400 bios […]