Sir Tom Stoppard 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...
Keira Knightley Although the movie industry is always accused of philistinism, filmmakers are often suckers for prestige novels. Richard Grenier, Commentary’s renegade movie reviewer in...
To celebrate Ronald Reagan’s 100th birthday, I watched his most derided movie, Bedtime for Bonzo. We’ve been hearing wisecracks about it for generations, so it has to be an embarrassment,...
Ed Harris and Colin Farrell in The Way Back 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...
Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling 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...
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...
Charles Portis and John Wayne The Coen Brothers’ devotion to odd vernaculars has contributed to their haphazard box-office track record. Audiences immediately cottoned to Fargo’s...
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 for, as far as...
DAAAAVIDI KNOW IT'S YOU! “I always want to say to people who want to be rich and famous: ‘Try being rich first,’” Bill Murray once said. “There’s not much downside...
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: “The Irish can’t drink.…Virtually...
Yes 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 pounding...
In outline, The King’s Speech sounds like a Wayans Brothers spoof of a Weinstein Brothers prestige film: an Oscar-bound movie where the King of England, a victim of society’s prejudice...
Harry Potter Kids these days have short attention spans. Or so I’ve often been informed. For example, Baroness Greenfield, an Oxford professor of “synaptic pharmacology,” recently...
The exuberant 127 Hours, Director Danny Boyle’s first movie since winning the Best Picture Oscar for Slumdog Millionaire, is surprisingly comparable to The Social Network. While 127 Hours...
ASIAN MAN'S HEAD FALLS OUT OF TREE. In WWII and the Cold War, we faced enemies the caliber of Wernher von Braun and Andrei Sakharov. In the War on Terror, however, a strikingly large fraction of...
Superman Typical documentaries, such as Waiting for “Superman” and Freakonomics, are made by people who know more about lenses and lighting than about their subjects. In contrast, Inside...
UniqueUneekFreakonomicsM'qhealMichael The new documentary Freakonomics harkens back to the good old days of 2005. Remember when economists, having permanently perfected the economy, graciously allowed...
Baseball statistician Bill James’s most sobering discovery is that players peak at such a young age (27 on average) that by the time they become nationally beloved stars, their best years...
Final Clubs In the Internet Age, an increasing fraction of media “content” is generated by young nobodies, much to the disgust of old pros, such as screenwriter Aaron Sorkin of TV’s...
Superman Davis Guggenheim’s much-publicized documentary with the meaningless title of Waiting for “Superman” makes the (by now familiar) liberal centrist case for school reform:...
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