The rituals of the suburban cocktail party play out predictably. Sometime during the late afternoon, amid the gleaming borrowed chafing dishes and the fluttering corporate wives, one of the guests, grown progressively less inhibited through drink, raises a glass to toast the beautiful hostess. She s

Road to Perdition begins and ends with a young boy looking out over Lake Michigan. His voice-over narration in the opening shot leads the way to the lengthy flashback that provides the story line of the film. The camera, however, stares out over the faceless waters with him, as though pondering his

Those of us of a certain age can sympathize with poor Cecily (Reese Witherspoon), a prisoner of grammar lessons taught by the indefatigable and assertively dull Miss Prism (Anna Massey). Oscar Wilde certainly did, when he put her in The Importance of Being Earnest. Yet those tedious days of Latin an

That delightful lull between the end of classes and the beginning of exams provided the perfect opportunity to catch up on movies missed during the last several months. As it turns out, Iand thus regular readers of this columnhave missed little. Two walls of the neighborhood video shop feature new r

For the last several months images of heroism have filled the media. The immediate heroes, the firefighters, police and rescue workers, have gradually been supplanted by brave survivors, mourning the dead and living for the future. Their stories have helped us through the horror, especially in this

What follows should come with a warning label for a goodly number of longtime readers. It is time for us Catholics to turn up the lights and take a second look at that brand of mid-century Anglo-Catholicism from both sides of the papal divide that dominated our undergraduate days.