my week at the movies: ‘Shrink,’ ‘In the Loop’

Slow screening week, as holiday weeks tend to be...

Kevin Spacey is a Hollywood psychiatrist in Shrink (opens in the U.S. on July 24; no U.K. release date has been announced yet). I hope he goes all American Beauty on the asses of all his celebrity clients and tells them to shove their problems while he’s totally stoned. I mean, why else would you make a movie about a Hollywood shrink and cast Kevin Spacey in the lead?

British political wonks go to Washington DC in In the Loop (opened in the U.K. in April; it opens in the U.S. on July 24). It’s a comedy, see, from the British perspective, and it’s about going to war, or not going to war, or going or not going to a PR war, or something. It’s clearly a not-so-veiled smack at the whole Iraq debacle, but hey, we may have been stuck with Bush for a while, but they were stuck with Blair, Bush’s poodle. So we’re not the only ones to blame. Or something. Oh, but it’s got Steve Coogan in it, so that’s all right then.