Denis & Margie Haack continue to write at Critique-Letters
First Tattoo
This past weekend Granddaughter turned eighteen – that magic age for getting certain things you have waited for so long to own. It was…
Category: Humanness
The Bedroom Vault
Ned Bustard of Square Halo Books released a new book I was privileged to see in manuscript form earlier this year. Revealed: A Storybook…
Film Comment: A Most Wanted Man (2014); Mary & Max (2009)
These films have two things in common. They depict characters that are marginalized, living on the edge of society bearing secrets that isolate them…
Ideas worth pondering—Leon Wieseltier
In “Among the Disrupted,” the cover essay for the New York Times Book Review (January 18, 2015) Leon Wieseltier laments how devices are often…
Charles Taylor (II): Subtraction stories are untrue
Philosopher Charles Taylor has spent a lifetime of careful study unpacking the meaning and development of secularism. One of the things he demonstrates…
Film comment: Child of God (2013)
Child of God (1973) is Cormac McCarthy’s most disturbing book, and the film is hard to watch. The story is of Lester Ballard (played…
Detective stories (3): a dependable hero
The appeal of detective stories includes our need for order when crime has introduced disorder (always a dangerous state), and our yearning for justice…
Film comment: Lincoln (2012), Waste Land (2010), Traitor (2008)
In terms of genre these three films are very different: Lincolnis a historical drama, Waste Land is a documentary, and Traitor is a spy…
Movie Comment: The Way Back (2010)
The Cold War is a part of history now, and I can amuse my grandchildren with stories of the air raid drills that occasionally…
Movie Comment: Another Year (2010)
This is an unassuming film, a quiet slice of life that follows real people over the course of a year and becomes a touchstone…