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 egalitarianism. Having turned 21 in 1956, Woody's enthusiasms ...
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 film critics as the definitive response to Christopher Hitchens's ...
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 1994's Maverick and today's leading object of collective hatred, Mel ...
The Cave of Forgotten Dreams is the latest documentary from artiste/showman Werner Herzog. It features the world's oldest known cave paintings, discovered in 1994 at Chauvet Grotto in southeastern France and immediately locked up to protect the stunning drawings of imposing beasts. The French ...
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 capitalist system failed to pony up the munificent financing ...
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 movie as a parable denouncing George W. Bush's employment of ...
With the Census Bureau announcing this spring that the number of Hispanics in America has surpassed 50 million"a large majority of them of Mexican background"it's worth remembering the "Fernandomania" that swept the country 30 years ago. America held only 15 million Hispanics when ...
In both politics and sports fandom, the fundamental question is: "Whose side are you on?" Exploring who roots for whom affords perspective on the big questions of who is politically loyal to what, and why. We can use some reality checks from sports because ever since the 1978 publication ...
The rise of the nerds to mainstream dominance is one of popular culture's most important developments over the last generation. Consider the gulf in sensibility between old Hollywood blockbusters such as Gone with the Wind and characteristic 21st-century tent poles such as Avatar, Lord of the ...
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 his health-insurance premiums. In a moment of ethical weakness, ...
