Dan Gifford

Sam Rockwell has been hauled back to the cinematic slam, and that’s a good thing. His Green Mile portrayal of Louisiana psycho murderer ‘Wild Bill’ Wharton bouncing around his death row jail cell was a standout performance. Now he shows

If there’s one thing criminals generally do well, it’s instinctively spot another’s inner demons and then mess with their minds to exploit them. In “Stone” (in theaters now), that street psychologist is the incarcerated arsonist Gerald “Stone” Creeson (Edward Norton)

Cultures come and go. Some age into oblivion and are replaced by another. Some are lost through assimilation. But others are literally murdered. Such was the fate of Poland’s thriving thousand year old Jewish culture and its cantorial music tradition

Conservative Christians get no respect in Hollywood. And because they don’t, they are making an increasing number of films that reflect their values in places where Obama says “bitter” people “cling to guns or religion.” Yes, we’re talking fly-over land,

One of the downsides of having been the victim of a classical education is that events often trigger unconventional connections. So when I heard that film director James Cameron, a man whose well known intolerance, arrogance and profane bullying equal

When Australian actor Guy Pearce played an honest detective in LA Confidential, he killed LAPD corruption by shooting his criminal police Captain mastermind. No such clarity or resolution in this film. In what could have been titled Melbourne Confidential, a

Having seen the preview director’s cut of this Greek film by auteur Nikos Tzimas twice now in hopes that it wasn’t as overplayed and trite as I first thought, I now feel better about saying that it is. My advice

Maybe I’m deaf and blind, but two weeks after a voting records examination report showed Minnesota Senator Al Franken was probably elected by felons who were illegally voting in that state’s 2008 general election, I’ve yet to come across even

Poet Ogden Nash knew the score: …if called by a panther, don’t anther. And that’s exactly what America’s liberal agenda-setting media has done. It has not answered the “New” Black Panther’s call daring it to report on voter intimidation by

Among Hollywood’s many mind benders is the fact that a book and a movie can have the same title but not be the same story, while two or more movies can also have the same title and tell the same

Genocide is an ugly subject that needs to be shoved into every generation’s face because the deliberate extermination of some targeted group by their own government occurs somewhere in the world during every generation. What does not need to be

OK, I walk into the TV room the other night expecting to watch some vintage Eastwood and what do I wind up watching instead? The Real Housewives of New Jersey — aka nouveau riche, high maintenance, goombah psycho bitches —

When times get tough, the unsettled among us turn to fictionalized superheroes to vicariously battle the world’s uncertainties. They can even provide an example for turning the lemons in our personal lives into lemonade just as Bruce Wayne (Batman) and

Robin Hood is back on the big screen in his umpteenth adaptation and he’s not only fighting social injustice by robbing the rich and giving to the poor, he’s fighting it by forcing English King John the cruel to sign

That’s the affirmative answer to “Is there a Hollywood Blacklist?” recently posed here by Gary Graham. It exists as certainly as political correctness and passive aggressiveness in Hollywood exist, and you know that it abounds and destroys the talented who

When Uncle Sam fought WWII, Hollywood backed him with patriotic movies and war bond drives and moral boosting celebrity appearances. When Uncle Sam fought Communists, Hollywood was a mixed bag. His GIs in Korea got support. His GIs in Vietnam,

If the evil men do lives after them, the legacy of dishonesty, demagoguery and hypocrisy that Michael Moore has been enabled to legitimize in film and the body politic will endure for a long time after he quits making documentaries

As Gloucester in Henry VI beguiled like the mournful crocodile, so the political praises and tears for the late Democratic Senator from Taxachusets mouthed by his enemies have diminished and signaled the time for candor. Teddy Kennedy was a cheat,

Who says time travel isn’t possible? I spent 92 long minutes in Woody Allen’s cinematic wayback machine yesterday, reliving almost all the 60’s pseudo-psychoanalytic cultural neuroses, nihilism and negative leftist judgmental-stereotypes he popularized then that still have us on the

A number of my ancestors served in the Continental Army, mostly with New York, Massachusetts and New Jersey units. One of those wrote the letter below which is now kept in the Revolutionary Era Documents section of the New Jersey

“A revolution principle certainly is, and certainly should be taught as a principle of the Constitution of the United States, and of every State in the Union.” — James Wilson, Scottish lawyer, signer of the Declaration of Independence, a major

A prominent politician accustomed to the bare knuckle realities of that world once gave me what he said was the best advice anyone ever gave him: When accused, deny everything, admit nothing and make counter accusations. That politician was “Big

Every time I have started to write a follow-up to last week’s piece about the evolving Jon Stewart, Rick Santelli, Jim Cramer CNBC massacre, new information that altered the narrative slid in over the transom. The newest part of that

Something didn’t sound quite right when I listened to Jon Stewart’s set-up for his sarcastic blast of CNBC’s Rick Santelli as a hypocrite who thinks federal bailout money for corporate America is just fine while a helping hand from Uncle

When John F. Kennedy was elected president, I did not believe it was possible to top the Kennedy cult fantasy craziness summed up by violinist Isaac Stern when he visited the White House: I felt as though I were inside