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, ...
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 Wonderland) plays the poor but plucky governess, while Michael ...
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 explained. Then Rango started, with Johnny Depp voicing an actor ...
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 how can we account for Stoppard's endless success? Sir Tom has ...
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 highest authority character "or I discombobulate 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 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 ...
