Peter Tonguette is a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal, National Review, and the Washington Examiner.
Posts by Peter Tonguette
May 31, 2024
His name will never be as widely recognized as it ought to be, but Nicholas Winton is one of the authentic heroes of the last century. Born in 1909 in Hampstead, London, Winton’s parents were Jewish, but he was brought up in the Church of England.
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February 28, 2024
Over the course of two seasons, the action series
Reacher on the Amazon Prime streaming service has lured in viewers for its vigorous action, surprising storylines, and vigilante vision of the world.
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January 10, 2024
Four decades ago, the American director Robert Aldrich made the most cheerful, companionable, and charitable movie ever produced about professional wrestling. Against all expectations, Aldrich—the grand master of the grotesque on the basis of such cartoonishly misanthropic masterpieces as
Kiss Me Deadly,
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Continue Reading...
December 05, 2023
Among all art forms, the movies have the greatest propensity to glorify violence, brutality, and savagery of all sorts. Because the medium is inherently kinetic, cinema captures the thrill, terror, and barbarism of battle; and because it is empathetic, cinema trains audiences to identify with and immerse themselves in the action they’re shown onscreen.
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October 26, 2023
What do we think about when we think about Martin Scorsese? Many of us think about gangster stories, especially ultra-violent, grisly, and operatic ones. He helped bring the genre into the modern age with his masterpieces
Mean Streets,
Goodfellas,
Casino, and
The Departed.
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June 30, 2023
During his past decade or so of directing, Wes Anderson has done his darnedest to make audiences forget he’s an American. His most recent films have been set in elaborately imagined fictional versions of Budapest (2014’s
The Grand Budapest Hotel), Japan (2018’s
Isle of Dogs), and France (2021’s
The French Dispatch).
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May 17, 2023
It may be hard to picture now, when American children spend seemingly every waking hour absorbed in Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, but once upon a time the country’s youth contented themselves with activities that did not involve gazing into tiny screens—you know, riding bikes, throwing around a football, jumping rope.
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December 13, 2022
Modern society has no shortage of candidates for substitute religions.
Instead of attending religious services, we can assemble at football games; in lieu of studying the lives of the saints, we can come to know Harry and Meghan.
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November 29, 2022
Sometimes it seems as though the only things that exercise modern souls are sex, scandal, and sin, but all around us, every day, there are indications that a not-insignificant portion of the population seeks something more.
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May 03, 2022
Who’s in charge in Hollywood? Surely studio bosses, well-compensated executives, A-list actors, and celebrated writers and directors set the agenda in the American entertainment industry, don’t they?
Not so fast, says
Wall Street Journal reporter Erich Schwartzel in a rigorously researched, admirably hard-hitting new book that looks at the pernicious influence of China on Hollywood.
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