What’s the difference between a good liar and a good storyteller? The answer, or the lack of an answer, is a mystery at the heart of The Night Listener, a muted psychological thriller adapted from an Armistead Maupin novel. A writer’s elaborate what-if scenario extrapolated from an anecdote, it’s presented…
Perhaps no one can pinpoint the exact moment vaudeville died, but there’s a moment early in Strangers With Candy where you’d swear you had just witnessed the death of visual comedy. En route to her first day of high school, a tarty middle-aged jailbird — this is not a Disney…
Let’s trade, action fans. Give up all 126 minutes of Mission: Impossible III’s digitized bloat and torture games, along with Poseidon’s more modest — yet somehow more numbing — 99 minutes in a computer-generated rain barrel. In exchange, you get roughly 1.7 seconds of a movie you’ve never heard of…
ost memoirs, like off-brand hot dogs, should come with labels that list their suspect ingredients. Outrage over James Frey aside, does anyone still believe that a person’s reconstructed narrative of his or her life isn’t going to mix some snouts or tails among the meat? The best one can hope…
If you can tell a society by its smut, America in the 1950s couldn’t have been just a Frigidaire of repressive hysteria. Hidden somewhere in the closets of Pleasantville and Peyton Place, after all, was a stack of fetish mags bearing the face and hourglass figure of Bettie Page and…
In 1817, a Tennessee landowner named John Bell was startled by a bizarre creature, described as a dog with a rabbit’s head, which materialized in a cornfield and vanished when fired upon. That night, an unexplained pounding shook the walls of the Bell home. Over the next four years, these…
Every year, when ESPN broadcasts the Scripps National Spelling Bee, a tiny flutter of hope rises in anyone who cherishes the life of the mind. Spelling is a sport? Sweet Jesus! For the duration of the competition, the brainy kid who gets his glasses stomped by knuckle-draggers on the playground…
