The Conspirator: Guantanamo Nay

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 ...

Win Win: So-So

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 ...

Mia Wasikowska

An Agreeably Plain Jane Eyre

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 ...

Rango: Johnny Depp’s Peyote Western

The audience laughed hyperactively throughout the trailers for upcoming animated blockbusters. "€œDo talking-animal movies always have extra-long previews?"€ my wife ...

Sir Tom Stoppard

Tom Stoppard: Baffling the Innocent Since 1966

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 ...

Unknown: Liam Neeson’s Descent From Alpha to Beta

Orson Welles once explained that he was, inevitably, what the Comédie-Française called a King Actor. "€œThey weren"€™t necessarily the best actors; they were the actors ...

Keira Knightley

Never Let Me Go: Tea Time for Organ Harvesters

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 ...

Winter’s Bone: Blood in the Ozarks

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 ...

Ed Harris and Colin Farrell in <i>The Way Back</i>

The Way Back: Hollywood Discovers the Gulags

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 ...

Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling

Blue Valentine and the Decline of Men

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 ...

A Miserable Slog Called Biutiful

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 ...

Charles Portis and John Wayne

The New “€œTrue Grit”€: Truer to the Portis Novel

The Coen Brothers"€™ devotion to odd vernaculars has contributed to their haphazard box-office track record. Audiences immediately cottoned to Fargo's "€œYou betcha"€ ...

Casino Jack: Homo Conman Politicus

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 ...

Fame! I”€™m Gonna Be Harassed Forever

"€œI always want to say to people who want to be rich and famous: ‘Try being rich first,’"€ Bill Murray once said. "€œThere’s not much downside to being ...

The Fighting Irish

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: "€œThe Irish can"€™t ...

Black Swan: Hysterical, But Not Necessarily Funny

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 ...


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