Fred Schruers

I was sad to hear today that Rickey passed at age 65; when I wrote this piece for my editor Will Dana at "7 Days," Rickey was in his colorful, Hall of Fame-bound prime. Thanks also to Alex Belth of the Stacks Reader for reprinting it not long

The almost unavoidable instinct when faced with a “boxing movie” is to take a step back—aren’t they all too often a reconfiguring of tropes and cliches? Won’t there inevitably be some moral or practical quandary that our hero—and hero he is overwhelmingly likely to be, for

There were no guarantees that James Mangold’s delivery of the story of Bob Dylan’s early days—quite strictly confined to the years 1961 through 1965 following Dylan’s arrival in New York from hometown Hibbing, Minnesota—would work quite so well as it does. And even with Timothe&

The corporation is enraged that the raw materials it is their charter to exploit have found voice and "answered back." The audience, to them, is composd of ignorant natives, who must be transformed, segment by segment, into docile proprietary consumers...not only proprietary but addicted. The Britsih opium

On June 7th of this year, the masterful  New Yorker staff writer and  author Patrick Redden Keefe appeared on Dua Lipa’s “Section 95” podcast that features her monthly choice of a topical read. It may or may not come as a surprise that the same Albanian-English pop star we

Anyone who’s seen Ridley Scott at work quickly realizes just how he’s churned out 17 films between 2000’s “Gladiator” and this weekend’s release of “Gladiator II”.   His work ethic is storied. One wintry day in the late winter of 2005, I hustled out of a rain