As Donald Trump’s strikes on Iran push the Middle East towards an ever- widening conflagration, more than a few have noted that the timing coincided with renewed scrutiny over the Epstein files. In this context, the razor-edged 1997 Hollywood satire ‘Wag the Dog’ - about a President’s advisers who fabricate a war with Albania to distract the public’s attention from a sexual scandal damaging to the administration - feels less fiction than documentary. Nearly three decades late

Among the more ‘interesting’ things to have happened on February 14 was the infamous 1929 gangland massacre in a Chicago garage, where seven men of the ‘Bugs’ Moran gang were allegedly gunned down by Al Capone’s men, posing as policemen. The crime has since been cemented in American urban lore as the ‘St. Valentine’s Massacre.’ It did more than any other single event to awaken a hitherto passive public to the ferocity of Prohibition-era gangland wars. It also helped fix the g

There was a time when war films aspired to something greater than the blood-spattered grit of today or tightly choreographed mayhem. They...