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 credulous adaptation that inadvertently exposes a polished prose ...
To celebrate Ronald Reagan's 100th birthday, I watched his most derided movie, Bedtime for Bonzo. We"ve been hearing wisecracks about it for generations, so it has to be an embarrassment, right? Bedtime for Bonzo turns out instead to be a small but nifty family comedy that was a deserved hit ...
Winter's Bone, an arthouse detective drama now out on DVD, is the Scots-Irish hillbilly equivalent of all those fine recent movies about the Irish Catholic Massachusetts underclass such as The Fighter and The Town (which Winter's Bone edged out for a Best Picture Oscar nomination). It's splendidly ...
To be Oscar-eligible, a movie had to have played for one week last year in Southern California. Last Christmas, I had looked forward to heading down to the ArcLight on Sunset Boulevard to a see The Way Back, a modest epic about an escape from a 1940s concentration camp. It's the first film since ...
Blue Valentine, a superbly acted indie drama about a middle-class nurse falling out of love with her working-class house-painter husband, is both a timeless look at how sexual attraction actually works and an increasingly timely depiction of male-female troubles. Since director Derek Cianfrance ...
Who's the leading leading man these days? Having sat through all 147 dolorous minutes of Biutiful, Alejandro González Iñárritu's follow-up to 2006's Babel (a pretentious clunker gifted with seven Oscar nominations), I"ll nominate Javier Bardem. The Spaniard won"t win Best Actor ...
The Coen Brothers" devotion to odd vernaculars has contributed to their haphazard box-office track record. Audiences immediately cottoned to Fargo's "You betcha" Minnesota accents and almost as quickly to George Clooney's grandiloquent Southern pettifoggery in O Brother, Where Art Thou? ...
Casino Jack is a consistently amusing biopic starring Kevin Spacey as the manic, bull-necked Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who recently spent three and a half years in prison for, as far as I can tell, running a little more amok than is considered seemly among Washington insiders. As ...
On Friday, I was shocked like the rest of America to learn that Richard Nixon had been taped in the Oval Office subscribing to a stereotype: "The Irish can"t drink....Virtually every Irish I"ve known gets mean when he drinks. Particularly the real Irish." On Saturday, I went to see ...
What's the most demanding sport? A 1975 Journal of Sports Medicine study by James Nicholas, an NFL, NBA, and NHL team doctor, ranked 61 sports on 18 different measures of physical pounding endured and athleticism required. American football came in third and bullfighting second. Yet the most ...
