By John Podhoretz In the spring, the most successful theatrical release in the United States was a horror movie you’ve probably never heard of. Not only was it No. 1 at the time… The Wretched even matched Black...
God and the movies love this big, dumb place By John Podhoretz Everybody’s favorite quote from Alexis de Tocqueville is a fake. The author of Democracy in America actually did not say, “America is great because America...
How Hollywood Just Can’t Quit Loving the Country It Wants to Hate By John Podhoretz Back in the 1980s, a writer-director friend of mine was pitching a World War II movie to development executives at a Hollywood...
How Dickens and pop culture gave us the Christmas we know today By John Podhoretz In his wonderful 2008 book The Man Who Invented Christmas, Les Standiford reveals how the triumphant success of Charles Dickens’ A...
America’s Love Affair With the Post-Apocalyptic Movie By John Podhoretz The greatest twist ending in Hollywood history came in 1968 when Charlton Heston rode shirtless on a horse down a beach, saw something horrid, and...
By some reckonings, the two most successful movies ever made are 1915’s The Birth of a Nation, and Gone With the Wind from 1939. Birth was the movie that ensured the endurance of the medium and inaugurated the idea that...
Finance is the great neglected subject of American art. Among the enduring American writers, only Theodore Dreiser took up the serious study of the “Lord of Finance” as a central figure in the national story. His...
How China Hasn’t Taken Over Pop Culture Yet By John Podhoretz American moviegoers scratched their heads in early 2017 when a trailer appeared out of nowhere for an epic movie about rival warlords in medieval China. It...
There might have been a moment of late when you sat in a movie theater struggling to remain awake as some entirely convincing space battle between two starships a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away took place in...
