Sometime in the early 1980s, when I was still a graduate student in English at UC-Berkeley, I received an invitation from a member of my dissertation committee. He and his wife were having a dinner party for a visiting writer, a much-lionized British novelist who was spending a week or two on the Berkeley campus […]
Wendy Lesser
Wendy Lesser is the founding editor of The Threepenny Review and writes regularly on film
for the Prospect. She is the author of The Amateur and several other books of non-fiction.
Posted inFeatures
Insufficient Evidence
I don’t understand why everybody is making such a fuss over In the Bedroom, Todd Field’s first feature-length movie. The film has a few surprisingly good moments, but these are vastly outweighed by its creakinesses, its unlikelihoods, and its forced, false emotions. It deals with a subject–the murder of a beloved only child–that is almost […]
Posted inFeatures
Tradecraft
The quality of most American movies released lately has been so low that Spy Game stands out as a significant pleasure. This Robert Redford-Brad Pitt vehicle is not a film for the ages–I may well have forgotten all about it by next year–but it does its self-assigned job very well. It is an example of […]
Posted inArticle
The Shallows
The Deep End is nowhere near as good as all the other critics said it was. It is not a bad movie, as late-summer offerings go, but it is a highly implausible one. And though implausibility is not enough to ruin a movie, not even a thriller (Vertigo, which is practically all implausibility, triumphs precisely […]
Posted inFeatures
In Dreams Begin Responsibilities
Many people will love Mulholland Drive, I am sure; and the fact that my admiration is mingled with profound annoyance perhaps says more about me than about the movie. It is David Lynch’s best film since The Elephant Man (which remains, for me, the pinnacle of his achievement). It is better than the goofy Eraserhead […]
Posted inFeatures
Robots and Actors
Steven Spielberg’s A.I. is neither the worst nor the best movie he has ever made, but it is certainly the strangest. Our initial tendency is to attribute this to the involvement of Stanley Kubrick, who collaborated with Spielberg on the project for many years (though when he was given complete control after Kubrick’s death, Spielberg […]