Peter Tonguette

Clint Abides: TROUBLE WITH THE CURVE

In one of his great essays about baseball, the late A. Bartlett Giamatti famously called the game “our best invention to stay change.” Giamatti (who, besides being president of Yale University, was briefly commissioner of Major League Baseball) added, “I need to think somethin...

PETER TONGUETTE: An extremely misunderstood, incredibly moving 9/11 drama

At what point do you start to wonder if a particular day might be the worst of your life? Maybe you realize it gradually over the course of an especially sour afternoon as things just keep going wrong. That is what happens in Roman Polanski’s "Carnage," and when the Kate Winslet character says at th...

INTERVIEW: What You Can Get Away With: The Collegial Cutting Room Collaborators of Joe Dante, Part 2

What You Can Get Away With: The Collegial Cutting Room Collaborators of Joe Dante, Part 1

Like so many children of the eighties, I grew up with Joe Dante’s films, and knew even the less heralded ones—like "Explorers" (1985) or "Innerspace" (1987)—by heart. When I decided to write about his work, I spent a long time searching for an angle or hook before I asked myself a very simple questi...

PETER TONGUETTE: EVERYONE SAYS I LOVE YOU is a stealthy Christmas classic

By the time I saw Woody Allen’s Christmas movie Everyone Says I Love You, Christmas was over, and so was New Year’s Eve. It wasn’t until some dreary day in the middle of something like February that the film reached us, weeks after the tree had been taken out to the curb and the confetti swept away....

PETER TONGUETTE: Director Steven Spielberg and editor Michael Kahn: a life long partnership

I was the sort of kid who paid attention to movie credits, even if I didn’t comprehend them, so from an early age I was familiar with the name of Michael Kahn. There it was, appearing again and again at the start of some of my favorite movies as a child: Close "Encounters of the Third Kind," "Raider...

PICTURES OF LOSS: A SOLDIERS DAUGHTER NEVER CRIES, directed by James Ivory

This last one is going to be hard to explain. Bear with me. It all goes back to a book of short stories by Gordon Lish called What I Know So Far, and the question, “Why do I think so often about What I Know So Far?”

PICTURES OF LOSS: MEN DON'T LEAVE, directed by Paul Brickman

It would seem that what I want are movies about the art of losing, as Elizabeth Bishop might say. But some of those same movies are also about the art of finding. Take Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun, a film that made a deep impression on me when I first saw it at the precocious age of eight...

PICTURES OF LOSS: RUNNING ON EMPTY, directed by Sidney Lumet

If I told you I was writing about movies that have meant something to me after my father died, you probably wouldn’t blink if I said that Hereafter and The Darjeeling Limited were among my choices. You might have even thought of them yourself. But Running on Empty? Don’t humor me—you wouldn’t have t...