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Leo! Russell! Too Bad 'Body of Lies' Is The Same Old Middle East CIA Thriller You've Seen Before

Three years ago, Ridley Scott's ill-conceived epic Kingdom of Heaven implicitly asked the question, "What would a movie about the Crusades look like if everyone in it had a 21st-century ideological outlook?" (The unsurprising answer: It would look ...

From CHRISTOPHER ORR, The New Republic,  10 Oct 2008

'Blindness': The Great Director Of 'City Of God' Has Lost His Vision

Fernando Meireilles's 2003 breakthrough film, City of God, was a discomfiting masterpiece, a sad tale of children killing children in the slums of Rio de Janeiro that was also one of the most ferociously stylish, entertaining films of the last decade. ...

From CHRISTOPHER ORR, The New Republic,  3 Oct 2008

Techno-Thriller 'Eagle Eye' Lays An Egg

If one were to take the typewriters away from Borel's million monkeys and instead equip them with a film editing machine and copies of Enemy of the State, The Game, Live Free or Die Hard, WarGames, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Terminator, and Wall-E how ...

From CHRISTOPHER ORR, The New Republic,  26 Sep 2008

Alan Ball's 'Towelhead' And The Prejudices Of Anti-Prejudice Movies

Perhaps the weakest scene in American Beauty is the one in which the brutal, homophobic Marine colonel played by Chris Cooper is revealed to be, in fact, a closeted gay man. It's a trite, sophomoric reversal, and one that briefly brings the ideological ...

From CHRISTOPHER ORR, The New Republic,  19 Sep 2008

The Coen Brothers' New Comedy Is Hilarious. So Why Is It So Sad?

We sort of wanted to do a spy movie," Ethan Coen recently explained, discussing his and his brother Joel's latest film, Burn After Reading. "It didn't exactly turn out that way." Well, no, not exactly. But the movie's subsequent evolution was less ...

From CHRISTOPHER ORR, The New Republic,  12 Sep 2008

Woody Allen Solves The Riddle Of How To Make A Scarlett Johansson and Penelope Cruz Movie Unsexy

"It's funny, I just made the same speech to my shrink," one character confesses to another in the midst of a heartfelt revelation in Woody Allen's . I had to check my notes, though, to see which character said this to which, and during which heartfelt ...

From CHRISTOPHER ORR, The New Republic,  29 Aug 2008

'The Dark Knight' Is An Ambitious, Frustrating Epic That Pushes Batman To The Edge Of Art

How far can an idle entertainment be bent toward art without breaking? This is the question implicitly posed by director Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, the first superhero film that makes a serious bid to transcend its burgeoning genre. It is a ...

From CHRISTOPHER ORR, The New Republic,  18 Jul 2008

Monster Mash

King Kong (1933). The Big Daddy, often imitated but yet to be exceeded (though Peter Jackson is planning a go at it). Still, if Kong was the most lifelike character in the film, his fellow actors bore much of the credit. For anyone who found ...

From CHRISTOPHER ORR, The New Republic,  10 Jul 2008

The Movie Review: 'Man on Wire'

"There is no 'why,'" Philippe Petit says he told the Port Authority policemen who questioned him following his 45-minute promenade on a high wire suspended between the towers of the World Trade Center on the morning of August 7, 1974. At other times he' ...

From CHRISTOPHER ORR, The New Republic,  7 Jul 2008

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