Pauline Kael

ON a recent afternoon at the Warner Bros. lot, Clint Eastwood took a break from a long day in the editing bay and strolled over to a hushed screening room. There, his armed-and-dangerous past was waiting for him, and the filmmaker winced when he looked it...

Paul Newman, the legendary movie star and irreverent cultural icon who created a model philanthropy fueled by profits from a salad dressing that became nearly as famous as he was, has died. He was 83. Newman died Friday at his home near Westport, Conn.,...

By Richard Rayner "Ulysses" (Vintage: $17 paper) is the description of a single day, June 16, 1904, a day in the mingled lives of characters walking, talking, dreaming, eating, drinking, mourning and climaxing their way through the hours of an average...

THE MOST UBIQUITOUS POLITICAL trope of the presidential campaign has been that Barack Obama is not just any old politician; he's a "rock star." (There are 770,000 Google hits of Obama and "rock star" and counting.) He attracts the kind of huge crowds that...

This weekend, when Roger Ebert severs ties with the nationally syndicated movie review show that had been his broadcast pulpit for most of its 33 years, when jumpy Richard Roeper (who replaced lanky Gene Siskel in 2000) bids adieu to the sacred cultural...

Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood By Mark Harris Penguin, 490 pages, $27.95 By today's standards, the Academy Awards ceremony of April 10, 1968, was a tame affair. No one denounced a war or declined an Oscar to...

Given that "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang" is Shane Black's directorial debut after nearly 20 years as a screenwriter, it's not surprising that the film has the exuberant glee of a kid who's just been let out of detention. A little of this kind of glee, however,...

To see the gorgeous-looking reissue of "Fanfan la Tulipe" is to go back in time twice over: to the film's 18th century French setting and to the simpler international cinema world of more than half a century ago when this genial action farce was initially...

I grew up in rural Virginia, a one-theater town, and that one only intermittently open. It was close enough that I could walk to and from it, which I did as often as my allowance and my paper route would allow. The first critic I read was Pauline Kael...

Sven Nykvist, the Oscar-winning cinematographer and filmmaker whose naturalistic, straightforward camera work distinguished the movies of directors Ingmar Bergman and Woody Allen, died Wednesday. He was 83. Nykvist had battled a long illness and was...

"Nothing stays buried forever," says a cop in the new Brian De Palma thriller "The Black Dahlia." This basic rule of homicide investigation also applies to De Palma's career. One of his very first movies was called "Murder à la Mod," and the murders...

The Chicago and Florida film critics agree: "The Departed" is worthy of high praise on at least three counts. The Martin Scorsese film, remaking the 2002 Hong Kong drama "Infernal Affairs," has won the best picture, best director and best adapted...