185 stories by "Gerald Peary"
All that WASP self-reliance and fortitude, and I, the Jew, am thinking, "Isn't anyone getting hungry? Doesn't anyone want to use the potty?"
This fine, partisan documentary resurrects Ann Richards, and it's showing on HBO in a Lone Star election year. The Republicans better worry about Texans seeing it.
Little Joe Cook, who died last week at 91, somehow turned his one Top-40 rock hit, 1957's "Peanuts," into the centerpiece of a never-ending Cantab Lounge gig.
It would take a series of spoilers to explain who might have killed whom in "The Galapagos Affair." See the movie and find out, and revel in the grim gallows humor.
"Silicon Valley" is sharp fun for both the computer lingo-savvy and for the non-Tweet, non-Facebook crowd such as out-of-it me.
Everyone these days is racing through "Blood Will Out," an undeniably enthralling three-hour read.
"In Bloom" is one of the best features to come out of Eastern Europe in recent times
My first thought: filming Donald Rumsfeld can only be rationalized if it's a front for a citizen's arrest.
Adeptly directed by Roger Michell, "Le Week-End" soars because of its glorious leads..
The first few episodes of HBO's "Doll & Em" operate as a fairly funny show-biz satire, but then the series takes a nosedive into turgid melodrama.
Are the 16-year-olds in the deep South capable of such a challenging, cumbersome construction task? Especially with the school year coming close to an end?
This death trip romance is powerful, weird, and intoxicating -- until its final scenes.
"Gloria" explores better than any movie I've seen how, when middle-aged divorcees become a couple, they are still affected by their relationship with their ex-spouses and children.
Who doesn't want to be in a movie?
Without being preachy, HBO's "Looking" offers a fine lesson that being totally out of the closet, as are all the many characters, can lead to a cool cool (and also hot hot) existence.
We do feel Charles Dickens's heart tenderly beating, swept away by Nelly Ternan's poised beauty, and it's touching in an almost Chekhovian way, his being smitten by a love which can only bri…
Nic Pizzolatto's scripts for "True Detective" have their moments but, self-consciously literary, they also are painfully overwritten.
In "A Touch of Sin," four depressing stories float into one other, all said to be based on news stories from Chinese papers.
The most unfairly maligned film of the year: Ridley Scott's "The Counselor." The most overrated movie of the year, which gave me a mammoth headache: "American Hustle."
"Inside Llewyn Davis" is a watchable if not particularily compelling tale of the never-ending woes of the protagonist, a walking basket case of self-destruction.
It's possible to argue with several of Stephen Sondheim's selections. Are all of these his best achievements? Yet it hardly matters, because the composer's tales of his artistic life, culled…
The big BSFC winner was "12 Years a Slave," which beat "The Wolf of Wall Street" for Best Picture, Best Director (Steve McQueen), and Best Actor (Chiwetel Ejiofor).
"Le Joli Mai" is serious and sober, a bit of a downer, climaxing in a lengthy interview with a dullard union official about why he supports the French Communist Party.
Jennifer Lawrence has blossomed into a charismatic screen presence in her gala return as Katniss, the beloved bow-and-arrow heroine of "The Hunger Games: Catching Fire."
Why haven't more movies been made about American slavery? Hollywood studio racism is certainly a prime factor; but even for determined anti-racists, there's also the aesthetic problem of cre…
