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Tom Carson

Tom Carson won two National Magazine Awards during his stint as Esquire's "Screen" columnist and has been nominated twice more as GQ's movie reviewer. Formerly a staff writer at LA Weekly and The Village Voice, he is the author of Gilligan's Wake (a New York Times Notable Book of the Year for 2003) and Daisy Buchanan's Daughter.

Recent Articles

Making Liberal Hearts Bleed in Anytown, U.S.A.

What is the purpose of didactic movies like Promised Land?

Tom CarsonJan 03, 2013

Political issues come and go, but message movies never change. Thanks partly to a relatively novel subject—fracking—and partly to an elliptical set-up, Gus van Sant's Promised Land, written from a story by Dave Eggers by its stars, Matt Damon and The Office's John Krasinski, varies from the norm only in fooling you for almost half an hour into thinking it actually might be up to something interesting. Too bad the movie turns into the same Ibsen for Idiots combo of a burning deck and a stacked one that was creaky when Jane Fonda was just another lonesome gal with a few New York modeling gigs to her credit.

Don't Put Flowers on Hollywood's Grave Yet

Film could be headed for a renaissance instead of its long-predicted journey into the blockbuster night.

Tom CarsonDec 21, 2012
AP Photo

This has been a fertile year for people to lament the decline of movies. In fact, two of the most distinguished critics around—Davids Denby and Thomson—more or less proclaimed in 2012 that the jig was up for film as an art form. Since one of them is 69 and the other is 71,  the "Après nous, le déluge" side of this might strike skeptical readers as a mite self-involved.

Zero Dark Thirty's Morality Brigade

Kathryn Bigelow's Osama bin Laden movie doesn't endorse torture. 

Tom CarsonDec 11, 2012
(Rex Features via AP Images)

Dial M for Meh

Sacha Gervasi's Hitchcock fails to capture the artistry of the famed director.

Tom CarsonDec 05, 2012
(Sipa via AP Images)

Among reputable movie critics, by which I do not mean the New York Observer’s unkillable Rex Reed (“Hitchcock grabs you by the lapels like a suspense classic by Hitch himself—a knockout from start to finish.” Yes, that’s a real quote), Sacha Gervasi’s atrocious Hitchcock has its defenders. They notably include The New Yorker’s stimulatingly unpredictable Richard Brody, who certainly can’t be accused of being a blurb whore by any stretch.

Cold War Revisited

Two new books examine how we have chosen to remember, and what we have chosen to forget, about the war that consumed the 20th century. 

Tom CarsonNov 30, 2012
(Sipa via AP Images)

Two very different books have recently done their best to remind me that nobody knows just when “the new normal” became the very handy cliché it is. But it sure fits how quickly the Cold War went from potentially apocalyptic confrontation to historical curio once the Berlin Wall fell, Germany reunited and the Soviet Union (huh, whuzzat?) vanished from the geographical lexicon. Even to people who lived through it, the whole 44-year mishigoss reverberates very little today; the elephant left the room, and that was that. Well, at least once its hideous, messy Balkan aftermath was safely behind us too.

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