Hollywood has always had a strong appetite for fact yet a curiously lax attitude in adhering to it. The typical biopic, for example, focused on celebrated figures, from Abraham Lincoln to Cole Porter, and tended to be sloppy and selective, …
For decades after it came out in 1925, Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, portraying an episode in the first Russian Revolution of 1905, was commonly described as the greatest film of all time. Even at the height of the Cold War, …
Morris Dickstein: The Challenge to Book Culture
Morris Dickstein: From Gatsby to Gatz
Morris Dickstein: The 1950s at War and at Home
When Kathryn Bigelow’s movie about the Iraq War, The Hurt Locker, swept the Academy Awards, it was a signal triumph for a plucky independent movie on a grave topical subject. Directed by a woman and made in Jordan without the …
Morris Dickstein: Greenberg and the Inner Nerd
As the unemployment numbers rise in the current economic troubles, it’s hard not to think of the flotsam of the Great Depression years, the men and boys and whole families who went on the road or lost their homes. We …
M. Dickstein remembers John Updike (1932-2009)
On Munich and Moral Ambiguity
The Year of the Biopic
Though full-length documentary films go back to the work of Robert Flaherty in the 1920s (Nanook of the North, Man of Aran), they have always been the uncommercial stepchild of movies that tell made-up stories. In their marginal way, documentaries …
As New York’s museums have come to rely on mounting blockbuster exhibitions, the museum going public has grown inured to them. The Impressionists, the great modernists like Picasso and Matisse, and a few postwar New York painters will always draw …
With the death of Meyer Schapiro in 1996, the art world lost a legendary figure while the rest of us, including the Dissent community, were deprived of a valued colleague, teacher, and model. Schapiro’s life and work touched several different …
