No writer ever gazed deeper or more despairingly into the prison of middle-class American conformity than Richard Yates, which may explain why none of his books sold more than 12,000 copies in his lifetime and why it’s taken more than 40 years for one of them to reach the big…
You’ve made the first movie of the Obama generation!” exclaimed an audience member as he rushed up to Clint Eastwood after a recent screening of Gran Torino. “Well,” the 78-year-old actor-director replied, without missing a beat, “I was actually born under Hoover.” It was an ironic juxtaposition, given that Eastwood’s…
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is certainly curious—a modest F. Scott Fitzgerald story about a man born in the twilight of life and gradually regressing toward dawn that has been adapted into a two-ton, Oscar-season white elephant. Directed by David Fincher from a screenplay by Eric Roth, Benjamin Button…
Claus Philipp Maria Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg—a lot of name for a lot of guy. Born into aristocracy in 1907, he was a soldier by the age of 19—and, by most accounts, a warrior with the soul of a poet (he was especially smitten with the work of Stefan George,…
Like Doubt, Stephen Daldry’s The Reader is low-budget, high-profile and beamed straight at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Category of High Moral Tone. Only in this case, the stakes are way higher and the attitude muted to a fault. Based on a partly autobiographical novel by Bernhard…
Walt Kowalski growls a lot—a dyspeptic rumble that wells up from deep inside his belly when he catches sight of his midriff-baring teenage granddaughter text-messaging her way through her grandmother’s funeral, or when his good-for-nothing son and daughter-in-law suggest that he sell his house in a gang-infested corner of suburban…
For so major a movie star—at least, once upon a time—Jim Carrey seems to make a lot of awfully minor films, several of them over and over again. Isn’t Yes Man, in which Carrey’s self-absorbed Debbie Downer green-lights every bad decision in an effort to reinvent his sorry life, just…
Two years ago nearly to the day, Will Smith and Italian director Gabriele Muccino released The Pursuit of Happyness, one of the most underrated of recent Hollywood movies, which starred Smith as a single father navigating a hand-to-mouth existence on the streets of San Francisco. Writing at the time, I…
I hear America singing, and I see…Richard Nixon. Not the man but the muse: Has any president since Lincoln inspired more movies, TV miniseries and operas? As Nixon’s beetle brows, ski nose and mirthless grin were made for caricature, so his rampant pathology was a gift for novelists and psycho-historians…
Back in the early 1980s, when I was a graduate student in Boston, a prominent professor I knew was accused of sexually harassing a female colleague. This man was a compulsive flirt who couldn’t get within feet of a woman without coming on to her, so I wasn’t altogether surprised…
Flying saucers just aren’t that scary anymore. Especially after Ed Wood and Mars Attacks, it’s hard to take a threat from a giant Frisbee all that seriously. So what’s an update of the iconic 1951 sci-fi flick, The Day the Earth Stood Still, to do? In an extremely bold move,…
First, a key spoiler: Cadillac Records is not the story of Chess Records, the blues label started in Chicago in 1950 by brothers Leonard and Phil Chess that featured among its stable of artists Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry and Etta James, plus many others who birthed…
Nobody in the film industry wants to be pigeonholed. Personal assistants long to be studio heads, gaffers want to direct, and name actors fantasize about hanging it up and doing something that, y’know, matters. In such an environment, director Randall Miller’s career is fairly typical. Using his 1990, feel-good film-school…
You don’t have to have been raised on colonial Brit Lit, classic melodramas, Westerns or war movies, or Gone With the Wind to figure out the likely outcome of Baz Luhrmann’s Australia within its first 15 minutes, but any or all of the above will help. Tightly wound and corseted…
Gus Van Sant has never been what you’d call a risk-averse filmmaker, but he directs his Harvey Milk biopic so carefully there might be a Ming vase balanced on his head. Van Sant’s steps are deliberate, his posture is straight, his attitude is responsible and his eyes are fixed firmly…
With his blazing white coat and pig-pink ears, to say nothing of the zigzag of lightning cut into his flank, the eponymous canine lead of Disney’s lively new animated movie Bolt looks a little bit real and a whole lot not. That’s not a failure of craft: Goofy and sweet…
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Well, who wouldn’t in this economy, even if the currency in question is rupees and winning the loot means being pegged as a fraud, getting a firsthand education in “enhanced” interrogation methods and having to relive some of the most painful moments of your…
Arnaud Desplechin is a cinema maximalist: A Christmas Tale feels like all 12 days of seasonal merriment, and then some. This comic, ultimately touching family melodrama is a heady plum pudding of a movie—studded with outsized performances and drenched in cinematic brio. The concoction is over-rich, yet irresistible. It should…
Shown in the market last May at Cannes, Jean-Claude Van Damme’s JCVD garnered a surprise critical cult. Audiences, midnight or otherwise, may never warm to this low-budget whatzit, but Van Damme’s self-reflexive turn gave movie journalists plenty to mull over. Had Belgium’s contribution to international kick-sock-pow cinema been hanging out…
Those of us who adored Casino Royale, the 2006 reboot of the haggard, self-parodic James Bond franchise, had some trouble trying to decide where to place it among the series’ finest. Was it better than Goldfinger? Probably not, but close. The Spy Who Loved Me? Maybe so. From Russia With…
I’ve Loved You So Long Kristin Scott Thomas has gotten so locked into playing tragic victims or frigid grandes dames that few remember the actress got her big break as a wistfully amused friend in Mike Newell’s Four Weddings and a Funeral, or that she played Plum Berkeley on Absolutely…
Paul Rudd wears the constant look of glazed-eye amusement; everything seems to tickle him, even that which annoys or frustrates or disappoints him. He’s frat-boy handsome and therefore almost anonymous when he stands in a movie-star lineup; in Neil LaBute’s The Shape of Things (2003), Rudd received a supposedly extreme…
