Like a successful spy, the quiet and grippingly brilliant Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy sits unobtrusively amidst the flashier year-end Oscar contenders—alternately heartwarming (We Bought a Zoo), Artistic with a capital “A” (Hugo, The Artist), tragic (War Horse, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close), scene-devouring and envelope-pushing (Shame), glossily true to life (Iron Lady, My Week...
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Great balls of tinsel, this third installment in the Harold & Kumar franchise starts off with a bang. The primary objective seems to be justifying its 3D incarnation, which it gets down to immediately, mostly by floating billows of marijuana cumulus and cirrus into the audience, as well as candy canes, Christmas ornaments, feces...
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One of the sweetest pleasures in the Shrek movie franchise is the Storybook creatures, who provide equal measures of cuteness, nostalgia and revisionist humor. There are Pinocchio and the Gingerbread Man, the Big Bag Wolf and the Three Little Pigs and the Three Bears and the Three Blind Mice. But the greatest and most charming...
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The much-anticipated political thriller The Ides of March, written, directed and produced by George Clooney (who also plays a major role) delivers a brisk, thoroughly entertaining ride, but in the end I felt a little as I did about the Obama administration sometime toward the end of 2009: with all that talent aboard (Ryan Gosling, Philip Seymour...
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Spoiler Alert: I know how she does it. And I’m about to tell you. The “she” of the title is Kate Reddy (played by Sarah Jessica Parker), and, for starters, she has a full-time nanny. The nanny apparently also cleans, really well, or else there is some unseen housekeeper, because the house is always...
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The newest entry in the “wise fool” series of literature, which includes Forrest Gump, Being There and of course Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, Our Idiot Brother aims to give us some laughs and teach us lessons too, about what things truly matters in life. The wise fool genre being primarily a didactic one, it comes as no surprise...
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Based on the cast (Steve Carell and Julianne Moore as a married couple Cal and Emily—how perfect) and a promising trailer, I went into Crazy, Stupid, Love fully expecting to love it. I didn’t, but I did leave loving the young couple (a surprisingly funny Ryan Gosling as Jacob and Emma Stone as Hannah)....
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Not just for those of us who treasure The New York Times, nor for you others who loathe it, but for anyone who cares about the existence of the free press and its role in a democratic world, Page One: Inside the New York Times, is a must-see. Unless you’ve been drifting at sea for...
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Once upon a time I was a conscientious mother. Following the American Academy of Pediatrics’ recommendation of no television at all for children under the age of two, I never allowed my daughter’s eyes to view a single minute of television, lest the poisonous media waves enter via the retinas and destroy her infant brain....
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If The New York Times were to break the story that the NEA has been generously funding an ongoing study of manhood and brotherhood among everyday schmoes in contemporary culture, that would explain a lot. Surely few phenomena have been as comprehensively documented of late as the dilemma of nondescript modern men (usually lifelong...
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