Raritania

As Balzac wrote in Lost Illusions "the world at large declines to believe in any man's superior intellect until he has achieved so...

Reading Alan Moore's comments about the politics of the superhero film, and what he thinks may be behind the genre's box office popu...

In his recent interview with the Guardian Alan Moore reiterated his discomfort with the way contemporary culture has received the idea of t...

Alan Moore's much-publicized recent interview had me thinking again of other critical statements he has made about the legacy of superhe...

I remember that not so long ago we generally expected critics to be tougher on movies than the general audience, and that there seemed abund...

A long time ago I decided to try and make way through the history of superhero comics in the systematic way I went through the history of pr...

While it remains a commonplace to picture the 1950s as an era of consensus and conformity that was, among other things, a time Before Femini...

If you read this blog regularly (there may be somebody who does--I hope) you probably remember me citing that first episode of The Critic i...

This month marks the 60th anniversary of the release of the first James Bond film, Dr. No . As one might guess--the more in as the James B...

Recently I had occasion to write about the James Bond film series and how EON Productions seems to have been very slow about the task of dev...

No one will ever admit it at a meeting of composition faculty, but it is no secret that students commonly find taking a composition course a...

The shooting of the last Bond film, No Time to Die , wrapped up back in 2019, and the film itself came out in late 2021. This makes it almos...

Those who read Honore de Balzac's Lost Illusions might be surprised to encounter in it the employment of the claqueur--the professional...

Two-and-a-half years ago the COVID-19 pandemic dealt the film industry a truly unprecedented blow, with the (correct) anticipation of collap...

All of us have gaps in our knowledge, and the contents of Balzac's Human Comedy were one of mine until relatively late. It has seemed to...