Caryn James
GET UPDATES FROM Caryn James
 
Caryn James writes the James on screenS film and television blog for IndieWire and contributes to other publications including The New York Times Book Review and The Daily Beast.

She is also the author of the novels What Caroline Knew (St. Martin’s Press, 2006) and Glorie (Penguin Books, 1999).

She was previously a film critic, chief television critic and culture critic for The New York Times, where she wrote on a wide range of subjects including media and celebrity culture. She was also an editor at the Times Book Review.

As a film commentator she has appeared on shows including Charlie Rose, Today, MSNBC News and CBS Sunday Morning.

Blog Entries by Caryn James

The Jackie Kennedy Interviews: Snark Becomes Her

Posted September 14, 2011 | 10:27:49 (EST)

Here is the great lesson of the newly unsealed Jacqueline Kennedy oral history tapes: Jackie said some snarky things. And her biting, often witty remarks have actually burnished and freshened up her image. Doesn't it make her seem more real, likable, shrewd and contemporary to have called Indira Gandhi "a...

Read Post

Rizzoli & Isles: Sex and the City With Corpses

Posted July 11, 2010 | 15:37:15 (EST)

When a murder victim is tossed onto a baseball diamond during a friendly Boston Police Dept. game, BFF's detective Jane Rizzoli and coroner Maura Isles go running. Not odd for a body to fall in front of them -- they are in a crime drama. But an unexpectedly witty twist...

Read Post

Allegra, John and Anjelica Huston: Why Allegra's Fab Hollywood Memoir Speaks to Us

Posted April 6, 2009 | 11:32:34 (EST)

Thank goodness I'm not a Huston. I was entranced by Love Child, Allegra Huston's irresistible memoir about life with her genius Dad -- John Huston, director of masterpieces from The Maltese Falcon to The Man Who Would Be King -- and adored big sister, Anjelica. But even if you've always...

Read Post

Shopaholic Made Me Want to Buy a Scarf

Posted February 12, 2009 | 12:55:52 (EST)

Early in Confessions of a Shopaholic, Isla Fisher gazes into a store window at a glistening, diaphanous, emerald-green scarf, (the ultra-long kind that did Isadora Duncan in) and knows that if she buys it, it will change her life. We know that if she reaches for her credit card it...

Read Post

On Culture and Politics: Lie to Me and the Age of Obama

Posted January 21, 2009 | 00:11:00 (EST)

Whew! Now we don't have to assume that every word coming out of the White House is a lie. But even in our new Obama age, human nature hasn't changed; every day we are surrounded by lying, cheating, manipulative foes and friends (kind-hearted white lies count). A smart way to...

Read Post

A Plea to Oscar Host Hugh Jackman: Less Johnny Carson, More Wolverine

Posted December 14, 2008 | 12:34:23 (EST)

I like Hugh Jackman, really. Enough to forgive him Australia. But this year's Oscar host seems to be heading in a disastrous retro direction, even as he and the show's new producers promise to revamp that dead-weight ratings loser.

The producers, Laurence Mark and Bill...

Read Post

On Wordiness, Godliness and Truthiness: The McCain-Palin Assault on Language

Posted October 30, 2008 | 13:05:27 (EST)

Once in our political history, wordiness was next to godliness. Really. As Sarah Vowell reminds us in The Wordy Shipmates, her wry, unlikely bestseller -- unless you think the world was hungry for a witty book about New England's 17th century Puritans -- one of many differences between the...

Read Post

Return of the War Room: Not-So-Extreme Makeover

Posted October 12, 2008 | 21:40:48 (EST)

Sometimes a political documentary plays like a horror movie, and Return of the War Room scared me more than anything I've seen in a while -- (not Palin-could-be-president fear level, but scary). Fifteen years after Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker 's documentary The War Room took us inside Bill Clinton's...

Read Post