
curated cinema: nailing a crooked politician, and making it good TV
2008’s Frost/Nixon is on Prime and Apple TV on both sides of the Atlantic.

2008’s Frost/Nixon is on Prime and Apple TV on both sides of the Atlantic.
It’s sort of adorable and sort of terrifying to look at Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps and see the ultimate 80s icon of sharky, sociopathic greed — Gordon Gekko — reduced to an object of quaint amusement, for both the characters onscreen and for us in the viewing audience.
I’m off to see Sherlock Holmes again today with my geek gang, so this seems like a good day to ask this question, which comes from reader DangerMom: Who’s your favorite Sherlock Holmes? TV or film, whichever. The IMDB has a loooong list of all the many actors who’ve played the world’s first consulting detective … more…
It’s a box. A cardboard box. Frank Langella brings it to your door, and inside is the Pop-o-matic of Death, and you either push the big red button under the plastic dome, in which case someone you don’t know dies and you get a cool million in a briefcase, or you don’t, in which you don’t get a movie made about you. Resisting the Moral Dilemma? No movie for you!
We know how it is: You’d like to go to the movies this weekend, but you’re gonna be busy staring at a big button, arguing with yourself about whether or not to push it. But you can have a multiplex-like experience at home with a collection of the right DVDs. And when someone asks you … more…

This was the sort of hopeless dread the news that Ron Howard was directing this left me with. I felt like Robert Stack in *Airplane!*: ‘It’s a goddamn waste of time — there’s no way he can land this plane!’
All this weekend! 5 movies I’m psyched for in December and 5 reasons why. No. 1: The Tale of Despereaux [opens in the U.S. and the U.K. on December 19]. 1. He’s a cute little mouse with big ears, and he’s wielding a sewing needle as a sword. How adorable is that? (Actually, the first … more…
Take a break from work: watch a movie trailer… Frost/Nixon started out as a stage play, which I saw on Broadway last year, just as news of its move to film was being announced. I was there mostly to see Michael Sheen, as British TV interviewer David Frost, and partly to see what playwright Peter … more…