Smashbomb

Search

Search results

All (2601)

Content

Killing the Emperors

Ruth Dudley Edwards

(0 Ratings) Rate It

Book

The outrageous and irrepressible Baroness (Ida 'Jack') Troutbeck, Mistress of St Martha's, has...

Miss Brill

Katherine Mansfield

(0 Ratings) Rate It

Book

'And again, as always, he had the feeling he was holding something that never was quite his - his....

Olalla

Robert Louis Stevenson

(0 Ratings) Rate It

Book

'Is it me you love, friend? or the race that made me?' A gothic novella about love, torment and...

Transsiberian (2008)

6.9 (8 Ratings) Rate It

Movie

Brad Anderson directs this tense, psychological thriller set on the Trans-Siberian railway, as an...

Encyclopedia of Political Assassinations

Nigel West

(0 Ratings) Rate It

Book

The objective of this encyclopedia is to identify and document the assassination phenomenon as it...

Amy Poehler recommended Away in Books (curated)

Away

Amy Bloom | 2008 | Contemporary, Fiction & Poetry

(0 Ratings)

Book Favorite

"This is the story of Lillian Leyb, a Russian immigrant making her way in a new land, traveling through America in the mid-1920s. Her daughter was taken away from her during a pogrom in Russia, and she feels this unbelievable mother’s pull to search for her child that keeps her going—literally—through woods and snow and over mountains. From minute one, you root for Lillian’s success because she’s this plucky heroine. I felt as if I were on the journey with her, so there were a couple of moments when I would just want to throw the book across the room and yell, ‘Amy Bloom, if you make Lillian suffer anymore, I am going to kill you!’ This is a sweeping story of someone new to America who runs into the best and worst of people. The kindness—and the harshness—Lillian finds along the way represents, I think, the real experience of our country."

Source

Kudos

Awix (3310 KP) rated The Manchurian Candidate (1962) in Movies

May 8, 2021

The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

1962 | Classics, Drama, Thriller

7.7

(20 Ratings)

Movie Rating Watch

Conspiracy thriller. In the early 1960s, war hero Raymond Shaw is feted across America for saving his comrades during the war in Korea - but those comrades are troubled by strange nightmares suggesting something completely different may have happened. Shaw has been conditioned by the Communists to become the perfect assassin, something not even he is aware of, and his new operators are about to send him into action...

Sounds a bit like a Red Scare movie, but surprisingly apolitical: the main villain seems to be more fascist than communist, and even the Russian characters appear to have corrupted by American consumerism. Instead, the focus is more on character, and the damage done to people by their experiences in wartime. An intelligent and cynical movie, well-played for the most part, and with an astonishingly good turn from Angela Lansbury. Inevitably linked in the culture to the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers in the 1960s, but still feels remarkably un-dated.