One scene in Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center encapsulated the entire film for me. A distraught wife of a missing police officer runs out into the street in front of her home after waiting all day for some news of her husband. The September evening sparkles with lights glowing through the win

March of the Penguins quietly took mainstream America by storm last year with its surprisingly dramatic story of emperor penguins in Antarctica. The documentary film was both a critical and a box-office success, winning an Academy Award and grossing $122.6 million worldwide. Several other documentar

Dr. T. J. Eckleburg’s eyes, an optometrist’s billboard on the road to Jay Gatsby’s mansion, stared patiently out over the Jazz Age, without blinking, without judgment, without tears. In their pitiless observation of America drowning in its own bootleg liquor and easy money, the eye

In all probability more people have read Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code in its Farsi translation than have read all my publications put together. No wonder. It is splendid junk, and I mean that as a positive remark, sort of. Brown has a flawless sense of his genre, and the book delivers exactly

Plastic chairs and paper cups, laptops and cell phones: the depersonalizing symbols of air travel. Baseball hats and tee-shirts. Boarding passes spit out of machines at the beckoning of a credit card. The herding into lines by airport and airline personnel clearly bored with their jobs and annoyed b

Brokeback Mountain received one of the most enthusiastic receptions of any film released this past year. The pony had scarcely left the barn before reviewers filled its saddlebags with potential Oscars. They seemed almost afraid to corral their enthusiasm. Why should such a competent but really quit