The movie industry cares only about money, not art. Right? Yet Terrence Malick’s four-decade-long career demonstrates how much money and talent film folk will lavish on an occasional prodigy. The exquisite middle section of the ...
Satire is a reactionary art form powered by contempt for the present. Although Woody Allen, now 75, has always espoused conventionally liberal views, he's one of the last figures in American culture unaffected by the 1960s" faux ...
Bridesmaids, the first female buddy comedy from producer Judd Apatow (Knocked Up and countless others over the last half-decade), stars Kristen Wiig, that passive-aggressive skinny blonde on Saturday Night Live. It's been marketed to ...
Movie folks think they are better than you or me, and sometimes they are right. Jodie Foster, for example, isn"t the world's best director, but she may be the bravest. Who else would have the brass to direct her old buddy from ...
Atlas Shrugged: Part I is the most universally despised movie of 2011, but I liked it. Critics hate this adaptation of Ayn Rand's 1957 cult novel for predictable ideological reasons, while Randites are embarrassed that their exalted ...
Robert Redford's courtroom drama The Conspirator recounts the 1865 trial by a military tribunal of Confederate partisan Mary Surratt for her murky role in John Wilkes Booth's plot to murder Abraham Lincoln. Redford obviously intends his ...
In Win Win, Paul Giamatti (perhaps best known for 2004's Sideways) plays a nice-guy lawyer, Mike Flaherty, who also coaches his old high school's wrestling squad. His family-law solo practice isn"t generating enough revenue to pay ...
The latest movie adaptation of Jane Eyre is slowly rolling out nationally via art-house theaters, but the plot of Charlotte Brontë's three-volume novel remains wonderfully commercial. The spookily pale Mia Wasikowska (Alice in ...
The audience laughed hyperactively throughout the trailers for upcoming animated blockbusters. "Do talking-animal movies always have extra-long previews?" my wife asked. "You can never have too many fart jokes," I ...
Tom Stoppard's remarkable career stands as a puzzling rebuke to cynicism about show biz. Sure, audience-pandering, trend-surfing, and propagandizing can explain the vast majority of what the entertainment industry sets before us. Then ...
Orson Welles once explained that he was, inevitably, what the Comédie-Française called a King Actor. "They weren"t necessarily the best actors; they were the actors who played the king." Welles had to be cast as the ...
Although the movie industry is always accused of philistinism, filmmakers are often suckers for prestige novels. Richard Grenier, Commentary's renegade movie reviewer in the 1980s, pointed out a common type of bad classy movie: the ...
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