Movie Review: Black ’47

Or just when you think things can’t get grimmer

By Bob Boldt

If you are ever looking for a bleaker Irish travelogue, look no further than Lance Daly’s 2018 Irish period drama film, Black ’47, whose title refers to the most devastating year of the Irish famine, 1847.

Sunday Review: Le Week-end

Philosophy, Ambiguity, and Humor

By Jonathan Price

Few films every year transcend the obvious categories and expected strategies and actually try to address the problems real people encounter in their lives, as opposed to a remake of Spider Man, another battle of World War II, or an inventive heist with many guns and the “heroes” escaping. Le Week-end (2013, directed by Roger Michell) does transcend these tired dramas. And its French-English title suggests both its location and its mixed heritage of British reticence and boredom and French liberation and sexual possibility. Even the title suggests the confusion of its heritage, since it is a legitimate phrase in France, incorporating an English phrase that is clearer and more direct than whatever French might cook up – but also a bit comic, casual, and offbeat and maybe puzzling.

Always on Sunday: The Iron Lady[: A love story]

Sundays feature a movie review. The column's title is a play on the title of Jules Dassin's 1960 film, Never on Sunday.

I first laid eyes on Christopher Hitchens's 2010 memoir, Hitch-22, in the Yankee Bookshop in Woodstock, Vermont, which beautiful town I remembered fondly in yesterday's post. I read the memoir last year, and one of the many passages that fascinated me was Hitchens's account of meeting Margaret Thatcher. It must have been in 1974 (when Hitchens was 25 years old), soon after she became the leader of the Conservative opposition: