By Peter Richmond Bronx Banter April 5, 2013 Unlike many of my social-media colleagues who were lucky enough to meet Roger Ebert, I never did. I only knew him a while back as a guy on a TV show, with another guy in the other chair, presuming to tell me whether a movie...
By Helen Lawrenson The Chicago Tribune 1966 At the present time the top young American movie actress to emerge in recent years is Jane Fonda. (This is not so impressive as it may sound, because who else is there? Raquel Welch?) Accelerating her pace in the past few...
By Mike Lupica Esquire April 1987 Here he is at Tiger Stadium in Detroit on a September baseball night hanging on to summer. He is getting ready to watch Jack Morris, the Tiger ace, go for win number nineteen against the Toronto Blue Jays. Elmore Leonard looks just...
By John Schulian The Chicago Daily News 1977 Long before he established himself as the Ring Lardner of the Pepsi generation, Dan Jenkins wrote about sports for the blighted Fort Worth Press. He had to rise at 4 every morning to put out the paper’s first edition, and...
By Joe Morgenstern The New York Times Magazine November 11, 1990 On a movie set, Robin Williams wears two heads. When the camera rolls, he is an actor of great authority and accomplishment. Between takes, he is himself, or a stand-up version of himself, giving little...
By Donald Westlake From Writers on Directors 1999 Here are two things Stephen Frears said to me. The first was several months before The Grifters was made and, in fact, before either of us had signed on to do the project. We had just recently met, brought together by...
By Brad Darrach Life December 1987 Meryl Streep is gray with cold. In Ironweed, her new movie, she plays a ragged derelict who dies in a cheap hotel room, and for more than half an hour before the scene she has been hugging a huge bag of ice cubes in an agonizing...
By James Wolcott Texas Review May 1982 Coffee and Coca-Cola, the crackling hiss of food on the fry, the ring of laughter in a bustling room—Diner, written and directed by Barry Levinson, is a bittersweet reverie about the pleasures of noshing and chumming about until...
By Charles Simic From Writers at the Movies 2000 Only recently, with their issue on videotape, have all the films of Buster Keaton become widely available. It’s likely one may have seen The General (1926) in some college course, or caught a couple of shorts at some...
By Pauline Kael The New Yorker November 26, 1984 Stop Making Sense makes wonderful sense. A concert film by the New York new-wave rock band Talking Heads, it was shot during three performances at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre in December, 1983, and the footage has...
By Ron Rosenbaum Vanity Fair June 1992 New York is a city famous for its talkers, its riffers, rappers, and raconteurs. But let’s face it, a lot of them are seriously overrated—depend on canned routines and canned Attitude, self-congratulatory cynicism and stale camp...
By Paul Slansky The Village Voice March 1979 On February 4, 1974, Albert Brooks walked on the stage of The Tonight Show for the 22nd time. His past performances had included some of the funniest bits ever seen on the show: an impressionist whose imitation of various...
