Good (review)
No actor has ever looked less comfortable in a Nazi uniform than Viggo Mortensen does…
political
Milk (review)
It opens with archival footage of police raids on gay bars, grainy black-and-white stuff that’s like a grim glimpse into a distant dreadful past, like the 1950s and 60s were another planet, and you think, Geez, people really worried *that much* about who was sleeping with whom?
Quantum of Solace (review)
We can only blame *Casino Royale.* The 2006 reboot of James Bond was so brilliant, so satisfying, so organically of the moment that it could only prove hard to top, and even hard to equal.
W. (review)
Surely this is the greatest satire of the American presidency ever made for film. It’s kinda like *Being There,* but far more terrifying: instead of a wise, gentle idiot becoming president, here it’s an incurious, perpetually adolescent idiot who ascends to the highest office in the land. Surely this would be a horror story if it were true…
Body of Lies (review)
How do you win a war you can’t win? The short answer is probably: You don’t. You don’t win it. You just go on losing it for a long, long time.
The Duchess movie review
She was the Princess Diana of her day. In fact, she was Di’s 18th-century ancestor…
Traitor (review)
Well, it took only seven years, two invasions, one extralegal offshore prison, pretend justifications for torture, and the trashing of the U.S. Constitution, but here we finally have it: the smartest, savviest, most seditious movie yet about the ‘global war on terror.’
Television Under the Swastika (review)
The Nazi Channel When you think “early television,” you think Ernie Kovacs and The Twilight Zone and Edward R. Murrow and I Love Lucy and quiz scandals and Rockefeller Center and the NBC peacock and doctors endorsing cigarettes. Turns out, though, that the 1950s were not the beginning of TV as a mass medium: that … more…
Stealing America: Vote by Vote (review)
If you need any more proof that a movie like *Swing Vote* is complete balderdash, with its fantasy about getting couch potatoes out to the polls as the cure-all for what ails America, then here is it.
Swing Vote (review)
You almost want to hug ‘Swing Vote,’ too, it’s so cute in how it thinks that it’s not too late for all that, that one-man-one-vote really is something akin to, well, maybe nine innings of baseball on a glorious summer’s day.
