David Lehman

David Lehman, a contributing editor of the Scholar, is a poet, a critic, and an editor. Ithaca, his new book of poems, won The New Criterion Poetry Prize for 2025. He runs the “Next Line, Please” poetry feature on our website.

A Reluctant Spy’s Conversion

Revisiting George Seaton’s underrated 1962 film, The Counterfeit Traitor

By David Lehman | Thursday February 4, 2021

Hamlet vs. the Nazis

A look back at Ernst Lubitsch’s 1942 movie, To Be or Not To Be

By David Lehman | Monday January 4, 2021

Rogues’ Gallery

Cinema’s greatest villains

By David Lehman | Saturday November 28, 2020

Gangsters in Love

Revisiting Sergio Leone’s 1984 classic, Once Upon a Time in America

By David Lehman | Saturday October 17, 2020

Coward, Take My Coward’s Hand

Looking back at Mark Robson’s Home of the Brave

By David Lehman | Thursday August 13, 2020

An Exchange of Bullets in Belfast

Revisiting Carol Reed’s 1947 masterpiece Odd Man Out

By David Lehman | Thursday July 9, 2020

Strangers and Mirrors

Orson Welles’s The Stranger (1946) and The Lady from Shanghai (1947)

By David Lehman | Tuesday May 26, 2020
Black-and-white photo of the "Running Wild" scene from Some Like it Hot. Cast members, including Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis, and Marilyn Monroe, play various instruments in the photo.

Great Movie Music

Fifteen examples that avoid the usual suspects

By David Lehman | Tuesday April 28, 2020

Epitaph for a Genre

Crime Doesn’t Pay in The Killing

By David Lehman | Wednesday April 1, 2020
Still from The Time of Our Lives

Souvenirs of War

Remembering The Best Years of Our Lives

By David Lehman | Thursday March 5, 2020

Twentieth-Century Quiz Show

By David Lehman | Thursday May 21, 2026

A Photographer in Words

By David Lehman | Tuesday March 17, 2026

Why Lee Wiley? 

By David Lehman | Monday March 2, 2026

Resolutions or Regrets

By David Lehman | Monday February 9, 2026

A Leap Without a Safety Net

By David Lehman | Monday November 10, 2025

Let’s Write a Villanelle

By David Lehman | Monday October 6, 2025

The Stolen Lines

By David Lehman | Monday September 1, 2025

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