Pro boxing kills. Emile Griffith beat Benny “Kid” Paret into his grave. Sugar Ray Robinson punched Jimmy Doyle to death. Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini, in a WBA title defense, killed South Korea's Duk Koo Kim with the infliction of a right, subdural hematoma. The human head...

Reading academic film studies can be frustrating, especially when it tries to reduce the complexity of the human experience mirrored in the movies to some quasi-Marxist dogma or once-fashionable postmodern theory. It can be both irritating and insightful�sometimes in the space of a single verbose paragraph. With that in mind I began reading Merrill Schleier�s Skyscraper Cinema: Architecture a...

Movies were never just entertainment. Even if a filmmaker doesn�t aspire to great art, his work often has the power to suggest not only new ways of looking at the world but new ways of being in it. In 2007 Variety magazine asked a series of celebrities, many of them from outside the film industry, �What is the movie that changed your life?� The answers are collected in Robert Hofler�s b...

Long ago someone famously said, �The camera never lies.� He must not have been referring to the movies, which from early on became associated with the sort of illusion once confined to magic tricks and darkened circus tents. And he must not have been aware that still photographs could be manipulated, if laboriously, in the dark room. Proven: at least some of the �spirit photographs� of the 19th ...

Norbert Schultze wrote musical scores for propaganda movies in Nazi Germany, using his position to avoid conscription into the wartime army. A cabaret performer and opera composer of varied interests, Schultze had set a soldier�s poem to music and released it on a record sung by a female cabaret colleague, Lale Anderson. The disc sold few copies upon release and languished until a series of seem...

For many of us, the world feels increasingly off balance. Life seems out of joint. Many of the apparent causes are in the human environment, whether it’s mindless movies, marketing campaigns to stimulate desire for useless things, political doublespeak or the endless supply of spam.

By and large, historians have credited President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal for getting the United States out of the Great Depression. From time to time salvos are lobbed from conservative bunkers, such as Amity Shlaes’ anti-New Deal tome of last year, The Forgotten Man. But like so many other books of its kind, it failed to land a lethal hit, and meanwhile the ranks of New Deal defenders continue to be replenished.