By Stephen Fried GQ November 1991 The scene is like something out of a colorized Citizen Kane or some surreal awards ceremony. Actor Ray Liotta stands in front of a microphone and podium, shadowy from the light of a pin-point bulb, while, on the other side of the...
By Fred Schruers The Washington Post May 8, 1983 Last night at the Cannes Film Festival, Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy played to a glittering crowd at the new Palais des Festivals, appearing as the prestigious opening-night entry in the competition. Back...
By George Malko The Stacks Reader July 30, 2019 When I met George Malko a few years ago he told me about his friendship with Pauline Kael which began after he profiled her for Audience magazine in 1972. Kael was the one who invited George to a press screening of...
By Robert Ward Rolling Stone March 3, 1983 “He drank too much and smoked too much. He granted too many interviews full of cynical observations about himself and his business. He made too many bad movies and hardly any of the kind that stir critics to rapture or that,...
By Ross Wetzsteon New York Magazine March 14, 1988 Flying. He’d wanted to fly since he was 16. Sitting at his desk in high school in Greenwood, Mississippi, he fantasized that it was a P-51 Mustang, F-86 Sabre jet. He didn’t want to be a pilot, he wanted to be a...
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 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 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 Michael Sragow The Boston Phoenix March 5, 1985 Now that it’s arrived in its uncut, 227-minute, director-approved form, Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America emerges as a pulp masterwork—at once the simplest and most indescribable of movies. In a sense, it’s...
By Joe Flaherty Inside Sports January 1981 All lives are failures in some degree or another. Somewhere along the line we fudge the pristine youthful dream. Even when we achieve, the compromises we’ve made, the injuries we’ve inflicted sully the prize. But most of us...