Claus Philipp Maria Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg — a lot of name for a lot of guy. Born into aristocracy in 1907, he was a soldier by the age of 19 — and, by most accounts, a warrior with the soul of a poet (he was especially smitten with the…
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is certainly curious — a modest F. Scott Fitzgerald story, about a man born in the twilight of life and gradually regressing toward dawn, that has been adapted into a two-ton, Oscar-season white elephant. Directed by David Fincher from a screenplay by Eric Roth,…
Like Doubt, Stephen Daldry’s The Reader is low-budget, high-profile, and beamed straight at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Category of High Moral Tone. Only in this case, the stakes are way higher and the attitude muted to a fault. Based on a partly autobiographical novel by Bernhard…
It’s July 20, 1944, and Adolf Hitler has been assassinated — the victim of a bomb blast organized and executed by a cabal of high-ranking German army officers seeking to wrest control of the country away from the Third Reich and, with luck, bring an end to World War II…
For so major a movie star — at least, once upon a time — Jim Carrey seems to make a lot of awfully minor films, several of them over and over again. Isn’t Yes Man, in which Carrey’s self-absorbed Debbie Downer green-lights every bad decision in an effort to reinvent…
Two years ago nearly to the day, Will Smith and Italian director Gabriele Muccino released The Pursuit of Happyness, one of the most underrated of recent Hollywood movies, which starred Smith as a single father navigating a hand-to-mouth existence on the streets of San Francisco. Writing at the time, I…
I hear America singing and I see . . . Richard Nixon. Not the man but the muse: Has any president since Lincoln inspired more movies, TV mini-series, and operas? As Nixon’s beetle brows, ski nose, and mirthless grin were made for caricature, so his rampant pathology was a gift…
Back in the early 1980s, when I was a graduate student in Boston, a prominent professor I knew was accused of sexually harassing a female colleague. This man was a compulsive flirt who couldn’t get within feet of a woman without coming on to her, so I wasn’t altogether surprised…
Flying saucers just aren’t that scary anymore. Especially after Ed Wood and Mars Attacks, it’s hard to take a threat from a giant Frisbee all that seriously. So what’s an update of the iconic 1951 sci-fi flick, The Day the Earth Stood Still, to do? In an extremely bold move,…
Nobody in the film industry wants to be pigeonholed. Personal assistants long to be studio heads, gaffers want to direct, and name actors fantasize about hanging it up and doing something that, y’know, matters. In such an environment, director Randall Miller’s career is fairly typical. Using his 1990, feel-good film-school…
First, a key spoiler: Cadillac Records is not the story of Chess Records, the blues label started in Chicago in 1950 by brothers Leonard and Phil Chess that featured among its stable of artists Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, and Etta James, plus many others who birthed…
You don’t have to have been raised on colonial Brit Lit, classic melodramas, Westerns or war movies, or Gone With the Wind to figure out the likely outcome of Baz Luhrmann’s Australia within its first 15 minutes, but any or all of the above will help. Tightly wound and corseted…
To brand, then dismiss, Four Christmases as a disappointment would be giving it too much credit. The story of couple Kate (Reese Witherspoon) and Brad (Vince Vaughn) who, fogged in on December 25, put their planned Fiji frolic on hold to visit their four divorced parents in the course of…
Gus Van Sant has never been what you’d call a risk-averse filmmaker, but he directs his Harvey Milk biopic so carefully that there could be a Ming vase balanced on his head. Van Sant’s steps are deliberate, his posture is straight, his attitude is responsible, and his eyes are fixed…
Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear, 1992 to be exact. Gus Van Sant, the filmmaker who had just thrilled the world with his young-hustlers-in-love classic My Own Private Idaho, was picked to direct The Mayor of Castro Street. Already six years in development, this proposed adaptation…
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Well, who wouldn’t in this economy, even if the currency in question is rupees and winning the loot means being pegged as a fraud, getting a firsthand education in “enhanced” interrogation methods, and having to relive some of the most painful moments of your…
With his blazing white coat and pig-pink ears, to say nothing of the zigzag of lightning cut into his flank, the eponymous canine lead of Disney’s lively new animated movie Bolt looks a little bit real and a whole lot not. That’s not a failure of craft: Goofy and sweet…
I’m telling Danny Boyle over coffee that his new film, Slumdog Millionaire, is his best by far. “I hope it comes across that I had a real blast making it,” the British director murmurs politely. Either the coffee is over-caffeinated, or Boyle’s Lancashire friendliness disarms me, or I’ve had it…
Those of us who adored Casino Royale, the 2006 reboot of the haggard, self-parodic James Bond franchise, had some trouble trying to decide where to place it among the series’ finest. Was it better than Goldfinger? Probably not, but close. The Spy Who Loved Me? Maybe so. From Russia with…
If you traveled the length of John Malkovich’s medulla oblongata, hung a sharp left at the desk where Beckett’s Krapp recorded his last tape, and walked through the adjoining door of the interstellar hotel room at the end of 2001, you might end up somewhere in the vicinity of Charlie…
Paul Rudd wears the constant look of glazed-eye amusement; everything seems to tickle him, even that which annoys or frustrates or disappoints him. He’s frat-boy handsome and, therefore, almost anonymous when he stands in a movie-star lineup; in Neil LaBute’s The Shape of Things (2003), Rudd received a supposedly extreme…
If the dream of every comic is to have his humor live on long after he’s left the stage, then the late Bernie Mac has exited this world on a high note. Soul Men, a comedy completed shortly before Mac’s untimely death in August, is no classic, but the comedian,…
