David Denby

No maestro was more revered—or more reviled. On the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his birth, it’s time to give him a fair hearing.

“Kaddish” is difficult because of its ideas—and its pounding insistence on putting those ideas across.

The goal can never be reached. The quest itself is the point.

On the centenary of his birth, a memoir captures what it’s like being raised by a man with mythic successes and long-held secrets.

Norman Mailer’s prescient reporting of social unrest in “Miami and the Siege of Chicago.”

How many of these details are true? It’s impossible to say, but truth, in this case, may not be the point. As Norman Mailer noted in 1973, Hecht was “never a writer to tell the truth when a concoction could put life in his prose.” Hecht’s gift for confabulated anecdote suggests one reason that he became so successful as a Hollywood entertainer. What Hecht got out of his ruffian journalistic years shaped his temperament, and that temperament in turn shaped American movies in the thirties. The raf…

In St. Louis, Houdini and his assistants dragged onto the stage a sixty-gallon milk can, a larger version of the ones delivered to grocery stores. They filled it with water, the excess slopping over the sides as Houdini climbed in. There is a photograph of the act in which Houdini’s unsmiling face sticks out above the can (his knees were pulled up to his chest). Members of the local police—with helmets reaching down around their ears and impressively ugly mustaches—stand to the side, looking lik…

A college class weathering the pandemic finds Dostoyevsky’s savage inwardness and apocalyptic feverishness uncomfortably resonant.

The young man went to war and became a novelist. But did he ever really come back?

Frederick Wiseman in Paradise