Iwrote my first movie review for National Review as an intern in the summer of 2001. It did not appear in the magazine (I was not that precocious) but in the virtual pages of National Review Online, an enterprise then novel enough and hungry enough for content that the editors permitted a 21-year-old to publish 800 words on a French-language thriller, With a Friend Like Harry, that I can’t imagine even 80 people read.
Five years later, in the scrambling-for-freelance-gigs stage of my career, I noticed that NR no longer employed a permanent film critic, and I pitched the late Mike Potemra, then the magazine’s literary editor, on writing occasionally about movies that had some kind of political valence. The first to fit the bill was All the King’s Men, a 2006 adaptation of the Robert Penn Warren novel that could have anticipated the age of Trump but didn’t, because it starred Sean Penn as the least plausible Louisiana populist imaginable.
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