Childhood on the page is memory doing reconstruction work. This tag collects reviews and essays on stories about childhood: wonder, terror, and the years that explain everyone’s adulthood.
AmericaMy mom pasted Green Stamps into books at Sage's in San Bernardino, back when stores paid you to come back. Now I pay Walmart $150 a year and it's still the best deal in town. Here's how Publix, Aldi, Trader…
AI WritingIn 1969 a Gulf station handed me a cardboard Apollo lunar module. Here's how American giveaways rose and died with the 1973 oil embargo and the extraction era, and why AI and 3D printing are handing the tools back to…
AprilEncourage a Young Writer Day falls on April 10. Frankenstein, The Outsiders and Anne Frank's diary all came from teenage hands, and in each case an adult did one specific thing that kept the pages coming.
ChildhoodEvery coming of age film reviewed on this site, ranked. Truffaut, Hughes, Crowe, Coppola and Gerwig, plus the horror films that use adolescence as the real subject.
1970sLooking for Mr. Goodbar (1977) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Diane Keaton plays a teacher of deaf children who spends her nights in bars, in a film that is genuinely good for ninety minutes and then…
2020sStar Trek: Picard rates 1 for its first two seasons and at most a 5 for its third. Awful from front to back. The first two have nothing in them worth defending, and the third, which almost everybody else rates…
1940sHow Green Was My Valley (1941) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. John Ford's film about a Welsh mining family across roughly twenty years is a good film that has spent eighty-four years being the answer to…
1990sLast Action Hero (1993) rates 6 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Columbia made a deconstruction of the action film starring the biggest action star alive, marketed it to children, and opened it one week after Jurassic Park. The…
2010sMatt Reeves remakes Let the Right One In with care and conviction. Let Me In earns its 8 by being the rarest of things, an American remake of a beloved foreign film that justifies its own existence.
1970sBrian De Palma's 1976 King adaptation. Sissy Spacek, Piper Laurie, John Travolta supporting.
1940sAn American family in 1903 St. Louis faces upheaval when the father announces a move to New York, with Christmas as the season of crisis. Meet Me in St. Louis is Vincente Minnelli's 1944 American musical depicting the upper-middle-class Smith…
1980sPeter Billingsley plays Ralphie. The film operates as memory instead of plot.
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