Scott Heller

Just as you’re getting ready to crack the latest beach paperback, The New York Times comes along with another idea about what makes for good summer reading. “How Race Is Lived in America” is what the newspaper called the month-long series that ran in June. “Race relations are being defined less by political action than […]

Young Hollywood actors like to boast of the hellish basic training they go through to star in war movies like Saving Private Ryan or U-571. Their stories are always similar. The message is always the same: Playing soldier will make a man of you. The extraordinary French director Claire Denis hired a choreographer, not a […]

Every weekend of my childhood, it seemed, my parents would pack my sisters and me into the family Montego, and we’d head to Long Island, looking for houses. We children didn’t dread the routine, the highway drive from Brooklyn and the perpetually deferred decisions. Instead, we reveled in the fantasy. First we chose which room […]

T he forbidden love affair between Lilly Wust and Felice Schragenheim was made for the movies. The setting: World War II Berlin. Lilly, the wife of a German army officer and the mother of four children, met Felice, an aspiring journalist and a Jew. While bombs rained down on Berlin and Lilly’s husband was away […]

F or up-and-coming Hollywood directors, it’s a regular stop on the pay-your-respects express: a visit with Billy Wilder, the man generally considered to be the greatest living American film maker, the sardonic impresario who gave the world Some Like It Hot, Sunset Boulevard, and The Apartment. Cameron Crowe made the pilgrimage in 1995. He was […]

P ay It Forward is the kind of film I approach with dread. Hollywood strikes many discordant notes, but self-satisfied celebrations of communal uplift land with an especially abrasive clang. Frame a public injustice as a mystery and let a flawed crusader clean things up–an Erin Brockovich, a Lowell Bergman, or even that violin teacher […]

G eorge Washington opens on a close-up of a boy’s sneakered feet carefully maneuvering along a rusted beam. Dusted in sunlight, it’s a quintessential image of American boyhood, evoking freedom as well as risk. He may be a kid killing time, testing his balance on a fence. Or a wanderer on a train track, both […]

F lying cross-country after a photo-op with the border patrol, newly appointed U.S. drug czar Robert Wakefield tries to rouse his troops. Thrusting out a dimpled chin as only Michael Douglas can, Wakefield dares them to be creative. “I want everyone thinking out of the box for the next few minutes,” he barks in the […]

R emember the name: Michael Winterbottom. Not yet 40 and already the director of eight features, Winterbottom is the remarkably versatile, remarkably gifted Englishman one great film away from a place among today’s moviemaking elite. His latest and most ambitious effort, The Claim, won’t be that launching pad. A romantic epic set just after the […]

Rock critics a few years back coined the clever term miserablism to describe a brand of guitar music light in metallic crunch but heavy with emotional self-flagellation. It wasn’t a compliment, exactly. Yet with songs like “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now,” bands such as the Smiths and their flamboyant lead singer Morrissey proclaimed their angst […]