Farewell to the seductive, propulsive Jimmy Cliff, whom I first saw on screen in a Chelsea movie theater at midnight amid the smoke of a hundred spliffs. The film was "The Harder They Come," with Cliff as a charismatic Jamaican outlaw; I have been dancing to his voice ever since.

Recipe for a relaxing Sunday afternoon: Reread Tracy Lett's (superb) script for "Bug," which takes conspiracy theory logic to its extreme conclusion. Then watch Kathryn Bigelow's (superb) "House of Dynamite," which counts down to a nuclear attack. Or: Just run nerves through shredder.

A most useful new word: "gloomth," meaning a gloomy warmth, associated with Horace Walpole, the progenitor of the Gothic novel. This I learned from a piece by Jon Day in the London Review of Books. My own house is steeped in gloomth on this dark November day.

Happy birthday to Goldie Hawn. I interviewed her for Vanity Fair in 1989 and found her shrewd, self-aware and willfully, enchantingly delightful. Robert Towne observed that for her happiness is a "very existential thing, a deliberate choice," which doesn't mean it's not real.

I return to the country, where I awake to find I have been sleeping with ladybugs.

Has any movie in recent years been as truly bad as "The Love Machine" from 1971? Paper-doll characters, push-button cynicism, acting so affectless it might be from a porn movie. It's so unspeakably bad that it's not much fun, except when Dyan Cannon sets fire to a lot of clothes.

Farewell, Dublin, to which I came for the Abbey Theatre's invaluable conference on criticism in crisis and from which I depart tomorrow. I hardly knew ye, though I already know enough to say you're my kind of town.

Dropping in on old friends in Dublin at twilight.

Watching "Casablanca" again and fascinated, as always, to watch how it confirms Humphrey Bogart as a brave new romantic lead. Everything feeds this perception: its not just how Ingrid Bergman looks at him (as he has said): it's how everyone, including Claude Rains, looks at him.

"Isn't this wine a little bitter?" asks Joan Caulfield, a blur of blondeness. "Dry is the word," answers Claude Raines, who has poisoned her. Why did nobody tell me about "The Unsuspected"? It exaggerates the formula of "Laura," and out-camps camp. Why, here's Audrey Totter and Hurd Hatfield!

And now, Manhattan, wrapped in mist at midnight. The view from the 64th floor.

It was that final fantasy of entering the afterlife that most enchanted me when I belatedly read C.S. Lewis's Narnia Chronicles for the first time -- the idea of moving "farther up and farther in": "You couldn't tell whether he was swimming or climbing." www.nytimes.com/2025/11/06/b...

This is where the curfew tolls the knell of parting day, and all that...

Now here's a quartet of faces to smile for. The team for the new Miss Piggy movie.

I woke up to headlines that somehow made me flash on Cyd Charisse singing (or lip syncing) "I see a new sun, up in a new sky" in "The Bandwagon." Savor the moment.

Is it too early to say "Yee-haw!"?

Done.

Trending: retrospective rue. "I regret everything I've ever done or said," says Jennifer Lawrence in a NYT interview. The restaurateur Keith McNally has entitled his (excellent) memoir "I Regret Almost Everything." Why all the remorse? Would Edith Piaf feel the the same today?

And now: November.

But where are the ghouls? There ought to be ghouls. Don't bother, they're here.

Oh, it's evidently National Cat Day. So I suppose it's a good moment to say how much I have come to cherish and admire cats. They are so very companionable and, like us, perverse and capricious. And the luxury of just looking at a cat...A cat's acceptance of one is always flattering.

From reading Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe mystery "The Red Box" (1937), I have learned that "ritz" can be a verb -- as in "You're in no position to ritz the cops." It means, per Webster, to behave superciliously toward, snub. I intend to use it in conversation as soon as possible.

As perfect a fall day as a body could ask for.

"Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang." I'm in a Sonnet 73 state of mind today.

Happy birthday to Catherine Deneuve, whose presence in film often suggests that the imp of the perverse is never more unsettling than when it hijacks classic beauty. See: "Belle de Jour," "Tristana" (Bunuel), "Mississippi Mermaid" (Truffaut), and - shudder -"Repulsion" (Polanski).

It's the birthday of the atomic Rita Hayworth, whose glamour blazed through the 1940s. When she was in "Gilda," my father, a night editor at an N.C. paper, arranged with the cinema across the street for his staff to drop in each evening to watch Hayworth sing "Put the Blame on Mame."

And it is the birthday of Oscar Wilde, who wrote the most perfect comedy in the English language (with "Earnest") and asked us to celebrate our contradictions. He anticipated so much: the ascendance of the autonomous public image, the cult of celebrity, the religion of style.

It's the birthday of Angela Lansbury, whom I first saw hurrying down the aisle of the Winter Garden, looking like alacrity incarnate. She said, "Sing out, Louise!" And suddenly there were tears of delight in my eyes. It was my first "Gypsy," and my first encounter with its peerless star.

Burning bush now approaching full flame. We are surrounding it with microphones, just in case this is the year it finally speaks up.

A silver kind of day: The view from a Metro North train window along the Hudson. Ah, the blessed quiet that awaits me after the jangle of Manhattan.

Farewell to Diane Keaton, who brought a new. awakening rhythm to every performance she gave, with cadences, inflections and reactions that hadn't been seen in American film. Her charm and her style were original; her emotions ran deep. This will feel personal to many people.

Feeling happy shivers as I romp through recent seasons of "Inside No. 9," the Pemberton and Shearsmith anthology show. Love its creators' giddy avidity in sampling the darks arts of storytelling, from true crime docs to commedia dell'arte, in pursuit of the "gotcha!" punchline.

Stumbled tonight into the 1967 "Camelot," and whoa! -- it's a Harper's Bazaar fashion shoot, with an elfin Arthur and a mod Guenevere striking rueful, sensual poses against snowfalls and castle walls. What I retained from childhood: Redgrave's raw, tear-blotched face at the end.

They've both been given impossible roles. The instinctive Bergman can't help acting anyway; Peck's part lets him stay blank. And yes, there's the bilge of Hecht's psychobabble script. But to be allowed to feast on those faces, in shadow, in black and white... "Spellbound" is on TCM.

Taking on the state of the nation and the state of the theater, the already notorious little musical "Slam Frank" may be the most important new show around. It rides one sacred cow to skewer a herd of others, ranging wildly and widely through the land mines of identity politics.

I had to turn off Fosse's "All That Jazz" on TCM. (Its self-regard does try the patience.) But I did stick around long enough to reexperience the high delight of "Everything Old Is New Again," danced by Anne Reinking and Erzsebet Foldi.

This long-bodied being showed up this morning, according to schedule, and of course sought out the most complementary background. I have asked it to pray for all of us.

Happy birthday to Julie Andrews, who glistened and sounded like newly polished silver. Such shininess is most seductive to a child, and I fell unconditionally in love with her, my first show biz crush. I still know every lyric from "Mary Poppins" and "The Sound of Music."

Happy birthday to Len Cariou, who is forever and always the definitive Sweeney Todd. It's hard to convey now just how shocking, and thrilling, "Epiphany" was when he first sang it on Broadway, audaciously followed by "A Little Priest" with the divinely demonic Angela Lansbury.

We were honored this morning by a visit from a Northern flicker.

The view from the last day of September.

Dignity officially no longer exists in the United States. Those who insist on holding onto it will be prosecuted.

The exhilaration, the anxiety, the adrenaline/endorphin rush that never stops: High on the high-octane "One Battle After Another," which I watched with a jack-o-lantern grin. Paul Thomas Anderson has created the movie-est movie I've seen in ages, and it's one hell of a ride.

(Fairytale ending): And the time came when the scales dropped from the eyes of Americans, and the spell of poisonous enchantment dissolved. And they saw what they had been, whom they had followed and what they had allowed to happen in his name. And they were sore with shame.

Plato goes to the Milan collections! In the Times, Vanessa Friedman, describing a piece from Prada, uses a phrase I never expected to see in a fashion review: "an anamnesis of a bra." This is what it describes:

Farewell to punster par excellence Mel Taub, who understood the special, shameless glee of Dad humor long before it was identified as such. I was always delighted to find his name (in tiny print) on the Sunday Times puzzle pages. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/24/c...

When was the last time you read a review that made you feel you had -- but had -- to see a movie? Manohla Dargis delivers a contagiously passionate case for the latest from Paul Thomas Anderson, and I am so there. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/25/m...

Have any other eyes ever signaled SOS so fiercely and relentlessly? Ever since I saw "Sudden Fear" (1952) on TCM last week, I've been trailed by visions of the flashing headlights of Joan Crawford's gaze. The acting may be mannered, but the eyes are fight-or-flight primal.

Farewell to Claudia Cardinale, who bathed any scene she appeared in with a radiance that melted shadows; it was as if she had swallowed the sun. On screen, her very presence seemed to bestow new life on the weary, from Mastroianni (in "8 1/2") to Lancaster (in "The Leopard").

And sometimes there is sanity so quickly. “A complaint is not a public forum for vituperation and invective. Not a protected platform to rage against an adversary," writes Federal Judge Stephen D. Merryman, in dismissing someone's defamation suit against the New York Times.