John Podhoretz

The war against Adolf Hitler was unnecessary. Not because Hitler posed no threat, as Tucker Carlson and his Renfield-like incel army of cockroach-consuming camp followers would have you believe. It

A good-looking young Muslim man who came to prominence playing video games while people watch him do so on a streaming service has chosen of late to speak about Jews.

The new biopic about Michael Jackson offers snapshots of his life from ages 8 to 24. It doesn't have a plot, really, just a timeline in which he gradually moves toward separating himself from his abusive father. With the exception of his early plastic surgeries, which he ascribes to a desire to make his face more symmetrical, there's nothing remotely questionable about the behavior of the kid we see in Michael . He's gentle and childlike and in love with animals and toys and Peter Pan. We are meant to understand all this as a form of psychological protection from the soul-crushing violence and emotional blackmail committed against him by his father Joseph (played as an unadulterated demon in human form by the brilliant Colman Domingo).

The novel called The Devil Wears Prada was a sensation upon its release in 2003 because it told the truth about the abusive atmosphere at the media organization that was then the most powerful company in magazine journalism, and about the disgusting behavior of the ice-cold monster who sat atop the greasy pole of fashion publishing. She bears another name in the book—Miranda Priestly—but there was literally no one in the world of writing who had any doubt the model for the monster was Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue

When a Pew poll in 2013 of American Jewish views on religion and politics and Israel showed stark divisions, with only 38 percent saying they believed Israel was making a

For a decade, we’ve been awash in analogies between America in the Age of Trump and Germany in the two decades following World War I. The central feature of these

The smashing new film Tuner —which you must go see if you like movies at all—has similarities to so many other things made in the past decade that it might seem derivative. A plot that involves purloining objects from ultra-wealthy people who will never even know they've been robbed evokes the Apple TV series Your Friends & Neighbors . A character with a profound hearing problem that makes him an ideal participant in a crime ring brings back memories of the terrific 2017 film Baby Driver . A hyper-intense student musician's approaching concert is filmed in a manner more akin to a horror movie than a character study, which gives Tuner a haunting and jangly quality akin to Whiplash

The smashing new film Tuner—which you must go see if you like movies at all—has similarities to so many other things made in the past decade that it might seem derivative. A plot that involves purloining objects from ultra-wealthy people who will never even know they’ve been robbed evokes the Apple TV series Your Friends & Neighbors. A character with a profound hearing problem that makes him an ideal participant in a crime ring brings back memories of the terrific 2017 film Baby Driver. A hyper-intense student musician’s approaching concert is filmed in a manner more akin to a horror movie than a character study, which gives Tuner a haunting and jangly quality akin to Whiplash.

Now 79, Steven Spielberg has spent the past few years dredging up his roots. His previous film, The Fabelmans , was a cinematic version of an autobiographical novel, following the course of his life from age 6 to age 18. What was weird about The Fabelmans is that usually such works are the first publications of a budding writer rather than a septuagenarian's career capstone. Now he's gone and made a movie about aliens called Disclosure Day , so you might think it's a return to his glory days as the auteur of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial . But it doesn't resemble those landmark works at all, either in quality or meaning. Close Encounters literally incepted serious science fiction as a box-office staple and E.T. was an unparalleled modern fairy tale that was for a decade the highest-grossing film ever made.

The original Toy Story is not a movie about children. It's about envy, status anxiety, and a workplace that threatens to become toxic. The boss happens to be a little boy, the workplace is his room, and the envy and status anxiety are the tribulations of Woody the Cowboy. His standing as the little boy's favorite toy, and therefore the most important worker in the room, is threatened by the introduction of Buzz Lightyear, the boy's new Christmas present. Bombastic and humorless, Buzz does not know he is a toy, and yet he enchants everyone in the room besides Woody—who undertakes a plot to get rid of Buzz that leads the others to believe he is a murderer.