A Heartening Oscar Crop
‘People need dramatic examples. . . . As a man I’m flesh and blood. I can be ignored. I can be destroyed. But as a symbol, I can be incorruptible. I can be everlasting.” That’s a line spoken by Bruce...
View ArticleAn Unexpected Interpretation
For viewers who were enthralled by Peter Jackson’s majestic films of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, watching the first installment (of three) of Jackson’s version of The Hobbit is likely to be equal...
View ArticleA Wonderful Life
At one point during Terry Teachout’s play Satchmo at the Waldorf, the character of Louis Armstrong, performed by the accomplished stage and screen actor John Douglas Thompson, talks about his...
View ArticleThe Dark Knight Rises
Christopher Nolan’s final entry in his trilogy of Batman movies, The Dark Knight Rises, contains less humor, fewer moments of awe-inspiring action, and a much less captivating villain than either of...
View ArticleWhat College Women Want
Damsels in Distress, Whit Stillman’s first film since 1998’s The Last Days of Disco, focuses on the lives of a group of co-eds at a fictional East Coast college that is dominated by a boorish and...
View ArticleOscar Surprises
What an unusual list of Oscar nominees for Best Picture -- sentimental and populist. Among the nominated films, there are no movies making big social or political statements, nor are there the usual...
View ArticleOscar Nominations: The Year of Sentimental Populism
What an unusual list of Oscar nominees for Best Picture -- sentimental and populist. Among the nominated films, there are no movies with big social or political statements, nor are there the usual...
View ArticleMemento Harry
Editor’s Note: This review contains spoilers.There has never been anything quite like J. K Rowling’s Harry Potter, the hero of a hugely popular series of seven books followed by a successful set of...
View ArticleMidnight in Paris
Woody Allen’s new film, Midnight in Paris, is a marked improvement over recent failures such as Whatever Works and You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which Allen indulged in strident liberal...
View ArticleFor the Love of God and Men
Xavier Beauvois’s Of Gods and Men is a French-language film based on the true story of the martyrdom of Catholic monks in Algiers in the 1990s. The Cistercian monks, who had lived peaceably serving a...
View ArticleThe Sci-Fi as Rom-Com
The new film The Adjustment Bureau, written and directed by George Nolfi, features Matt Damon as David Norris, a politician whose chance encounter with Elise Sellas (Emily Blunt) complicates not only...
View ArticleAvatar on Earth Day
James Cameron’s record-shattering film Avatar is being released on DVD today. Today is not a Tuesday, the day DVDs normally hit the stores, but a Thursday, to coincide with the 40th annual Earth Day:...
View ArticlePerpetual Motion
Pascal once observed that, in the absence of a framing purpose for human life, the best life was one with access to a host of diversions. Moving its denizens from one diversion to another, modern...
View ArticleFrom the Projects to the Ravens
The Blind Side is the true story of the high-school years of Baltimore Ravens lineman Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron), who was born in a Memphis housing project with no father and a drug-addicted mother....
View ArticleJust Bite Her Already
If Elvis and Christopher Walken had a son, he would look like Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), the dreamy-eyed vampire in Chris Weitz’s film The Twilight Saga: New Moon. The much-anticipated film is a...
View ArticleHeld by the Past
‘So, who are you supposed to be?” a man asks Don Draper on Halloween night as he and his wife, Betty, take their children trick-or-treating. That of course is the abiding question of the critically...
View ArticleInflated Hopes
Director Cedric Klapisch’s new film, Paris, begins with young girls looking out over the City of Light and asking their mother, “Where is the universe?” She responds, “Everywhere.” But for the city...
View ArticleFame Fizzles
In an early scene in Fame, director Kevin Tancharoen’s remake of the Oscar-winning film from 1980, students who have made the cut for entrance into the highly selective New York City High School of...
View ArticleWho Is Don Draper?
‘I keep going different places, and always winding up where I’ve already been.” That is a comment by Don Draper (Jon Hamm), the main character of the critically acclaimed AMC series Mad Men, in its...
View ArticleHigh School Rock Musical
The new Walden Media production, Bandslam, is for the most part an entertaining story about the new kid in town, Will Burton (Gaelan Connell), a classic-rock purist and typical loner who suddenly finds...
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