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Ran is Japanese director Akira Kurosawa's rendering of Shakespeare's King Lear, mixed with an adaptation of the legends of the Japanese daimyō, Mōri Motonari. It was produced in 1985 to critical acclaim, and is widely considered one of the...

Director Jingle Ma has been quite outspoken in his insistence that this version of the story of Mulan is vastly different to the more familiar 1998 version from Walt Disney. Unlike its Disney predecessor, this is not an animated movie; made in...

Cultivating the Mind of Love by Vietnamese Buddhist and peace activist Thích Nhất Hạnh (Thich Nhat Hanh) is a essentially a guide on how to love, according to the Mahayana Buddhist tradition, as it shows the way it is practiced. The book was first...

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is Martin McDonagh's third full-length feature film. It is also his first feature-length film to win an Academy Award (his 2004 short film, Six Shooter, won the Best Live Action Short Film Academy Award)....

Blackass is no doubt an exceptionally complex and unique book. However, it received exceedingly mixed -- and skewed slightly negative -- reviews. Michael Schaub of NPR called the book "audacious" but remarked that "Blackass, [al]though very good...

Kenneth Slessor is considered to be one of the first truly Australian poets, largely because he was a first-generation Australian, rather than a settler, or a transported prisoner, from England, as most of the well-known poets that went before him...

A Very Very Very Dark Matter (released in 2018) represents somewhat of a homecoming for playwright and filmmaker Martin McDonagh. For most of his career, McDonagh solely worked in theater. However, he has since released a number of films: his...

Scotland would seem like an unlikely place in which to set a science fiction story about an extra-terrestrial woman who preys on men; yet, this is the setting for Jonathan Glazer's 2013 fantasy movie that is very loosely adapted from Michel...

Milton wrote “Lycidas” a few months after his friend, Edward King, died in a shipwreck in 1637. The poem is a pastoral elegy—a form of poetry used to memorialize the dead—and has become one of the most famous reflections on loss in the English...

Olga Tokarczuk is a modern Polish writer, whose works are focused on human origin and place in the world. Questions of self-identity and self-recognition are rather keen in the modern world of globalization, and Olga Tokarczuk, as many other...

De Republica Anglorum was written by Sir Thomas Smith in 1562 during the time of his occupation as the ambassador to Queen Elizabeth in France. His job as ambassador was to describe and evaluate the “English social institutions, judicial system...

"To Wordsworth" is an altered Shakespearean sonnet, written by Percy Bysshe Shelley and addressed to William Wordsworth, mourning Wordsworth's turn to reactionary politics exemplified by his 1814 book The Excursion.

In 1814, William Wordsworth...

Although Sir Gowther could legitimately be considered a poem, it is more usually referred to as a tall-rhyme romance, consisting of twelve stanzas that read more like short paragraphs than actual poetic verses. Dating from the Middle Ages, it...

Translations is a play written by Brian Friel in 1980. It is a play in three acts that looks at language, and the history of cultural imperialism in Ireland. It was first performed at the Guildhall in Derry, Northern Ireland in 1980, a decision...

David Mamet’s Oleanna premiered in May 1992, as the first production of Mamet’s Back Bay Theater Company in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The debut featured William H. Macy as John, an aloof and pretentious academic, and Rebecca Pidgeon as Carol, his...

Shutter Island (2010) is a psychological thriller directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Michelle Williams, and Max von Sydow. Released by Paramount Pictures, the film is adapted from Dennis...

Philip Sidney's "Ring Out Your Bells" first appeared under the title of "Dirge" (a song that laments the dead) in Sidney's 1598 volume Certaine Sonets. It may have been written after the marriage of Sidney's former fiancée Lady Penelope Devereux...

British literary giant Roald Dahl had an interesting heritage; born in Wales to Norwegian parents, Dahl was raised by his mother after his father's death. Despite his obvious literary genius, Dahl did not attend college after graduating from high...

Roxane Gay's Difficult Women is certainly an interesting book. Released in January 2017, this short story collection is a follow-up to her massively successful essay collection called Bad Feminist (which was released in 2014). Julia Fesenthal of...

"Happy the Man" is one of John Dryden's most familiar short poems to the modern reader. And yet, this poem is not entirely of his own making. In addition to being a playwright and prodigious creator of unique poetic flights of fancy, Dryden began...

At 404 pages, The Doctor Stories is a collection of handpicked short stories by Richard Selzer himself. It holds thirty years of his previous work, two new additions, and an introduction delving into his beginnings as a writer and the birth of his...

Originally published in 1974, Rituals of Surgery is Richard Selzer’s first collection of short stories. It indulges in the not-so-openly discussed perspective of surgical doctors and the experiences they go through when treating patients. The...

Over the course of his illustrious career, Stephen King has written more than a dozen bonafide classic novels. In fact, prior to the release of The Shining (his third book), he published two classics in the form of Carrie and 'Salem's Lot. The...

Film critic Roger Ebert wrote that, while watching Hard Candy, "There is undeniable fascination in the situation as it unfolds... Seen as a film, seen as acting and direction, seen as just exactly how it unfolds on the screen, Hard Candy is...