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, ...
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 ...
