The new PBS Masterpiece series Marble Hall Murders is a sumptuously filmed “cozy” with an unthreatening structural complexity. The Viking Cruises crowd will eat it up with a Christofle spoon. Like its predecessors, Magpie Murders (2022) and Moonflower Murders (2024), the new show is based on a book by Anthony Horowitz, who returns here as […]
The girls cleaned up at my (Brad’s) daughter’s middle school graduation in Virginia this month. Three out of four of the school’s top awards went to girls. A majority of the “President’s Academic Excellence Awards,” an award given to students who maintained an “A” average each semester throughout their middle school career, went to girls. […]
Roughly one in four American children grows up without a father at home, and birth rates hover near historic lows. Amid these challenges, fathers are often cast in the culture as extras in an increasingly task‑driven portrayal of parenting, reduced to a name on a car‑pool schedule or a wallet at the ready. On Father’s Day, […]
The world certainly isn’t aching for more live-action remakes. Disney’s offerings have ranged from the not too bad to the just OK to the downright terrible. But sometimes, a remake is more than a cash grab, and it comes just when you need it. Such is the case with Dreamworks’s How to Train Your Dragon, […]
Patriarchy in some cultures can be excessive. Parents can have too much control over their children’s lives. Men can have too much power over women. The present can have too much deference for the past. None of this is true in America today, though. One in four children is raised without a father or stepfather […]
God knows today’s right indulges in plenty of absurdly overheated rhetoric, but can Democrats please quit proclaiming the end of democracy over every trivial...
Eccentric and quirky characters; symmetrically framed, pastel-shaded shots; estranged fathers trying to rekindle broken relationships with their dysfunctional families — all the hallmarks of a Wes Anderson movie permeate The Phoenician Scheme, the stylistic filmmaker’s 13th feature. Nicknamed “Mr. Five Percent” and loosely based on the infamous Armenian multimillionaire Calouste Gulbenkian, Benicio del Toro disappears into […]
