Jonathan Kirshner is the author of Hollywood’s Last Golden Age: Politics, Society, and the Seventies Film in America, and co-editor (with Jon Lewis) of When the Movies Mattered: The New Hollywood Revisited. He is a professor in the Political Science Department at Boston College. 
Drama · Dreams · Mystery · Sex & Relationships
Eyes Wide Shut was, without doubt, Kubrick’s most personal picture; it was also, in the director’s estimate, his greatest. It is hard to argue with that assessment, although four or[…]
Activist & Political · Counterculture · Crime · Drama · Urban Conflict · Writers & Critics
For a popular entertainment, One Battle is ultimately hopeful but not pandering. Viewers do not leave the theater with the spoon-fed feel-good reassurances offered by a Rocky or a Star[…]
Sam Wasson, The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood (New York: Flatiron Books, 2020). * * * Sam Wasson’s The Big Goodbye tells the irresistible tale of[…]
“There are no waves, there is only the ocean.” – Claude Chabrol * * * From 1968 to 1975 Claude Chabrol directed a dozen films – one of the most[…]
Years from now, there will be little question as to his place in film history – a prominent seat at the grownups’ table, with a place card highlighting his run[…]
First daring and experimental in an era of conformity, then classical in the age of the new wave, and finally nuanced and introspective when fashionable tastes ran radical and revolutionary[…]
Crime · Directors · Thrillers & Action
“Claude Chabrol,” David Thomson wrote in his 2010 obituary, “is the kind of figure who could be reclaimed after death.” Very well, then – four years later there is still[…]
Activist & Political · Documentaries
“Following his interest in the cab driver with a taste for the story, not the politics, John incidentally finds out that — shades of today’s NSA controversies — his station managers have been letting the police and the FBI study his footage to aid in their search for subversives. It is also the kind of reporting, it seems, that can get one fired.”
