The New Republic

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How do you make a sequel to a blockbuster when the star of your film declines to return for a second go-round? I refer, of course, to Tom Hanks’s hairdo in The Da Vinci Code. Slipshod and plodding though that film was, the mullety muss adorning Hanks’s pate was a source of nearly inexhaustible amusement. READ MORE >>

I am not a Trekkie. It’s important that this be clearly established before we move on. Yes, as a boy I was a fan of the original “Star Trek,” to the point where I could distinguish a Saladin-class Destroyer from a Ptolemy-class tug--an admission I’d be loath to make if my wife weren’t already bound to me by marital vows, two children, and a large puppy. But I never cottoned to the subsequent Trek series and bailed out on the movie adaptations shortly after the Enterprise started rescuing whales in the mid-80s. I am not, in other words, someone who approached director J. J. READ MORE >>

What do you do when your superhero franchise has no future? You reverse time’s arrow and plunder the past. After two strong, Bryan-Singer-directed outings, the original X-Men trilogy wheezed to a grim, dispirited conclusion in 2006 with the Brett-Ratner-helmed X-Men: The Last Stand--a lurching wreck of a movie that should have added $5 million to Singer’s subsequent asking price. So, having hit a wall going forward, the franchise has turned back. READ MORE >>

"Great directors," said Alexander MacKendrick (who was one), "dissolve and disappear into the work while making other people look good." Best known for directing The Ladykillers and Sweet Smell of Success, MacKendrick meant that a director's contribution to a film is at once the most crucial and the most obscure: He bears partial credit for almost every element--the cinematography, the editing, the set design, the individual performances of the actors--yet full credit for none.Little wonder then, that there is such confusion about what exactly a director does. READ MORE >>

“I do words for a living,” Robert Downey Jr. explains testily at one point in his new film The Soloist, and though the statement belongs to Downey’s character, real-life L.A. Times columnist Steve Lopez, it might as easily be Downey’s own. No other star in film today offers line readings so meticulously crafted and yet so self-conscious. As the syllables tumble out, Downey seems already to be reassessing them: Did he really choose to utter those words? Should he have chosen better ones? READ MORE >>

The most memorable element of the Russell Crowe journo-thriller State of Play may be its score, and not in a good way. Composer Alex Heffes once explained that he prefers to score a film around the dialogue, rather than through it, which seems to be a modest way of saying that he doesn’t want his music to be upstaged by all that dull talk talk talk. So every time a performer closes his mouth for the length of a four-count, Heffes fills the aural space to the brim with throbbing beats and jangling strings that declare something suspenseful is going on right now! READ MORE >>

Director Jody Hill begins his mordant comedy Observe and Report by surveying a suburban mall--the glazed shoppers, the indifferent salespeople--to the accompaniment of The Band’s cover of Dylan’s “When I Paint My Masterpiece”: Oh, the streets of Rome are filled with rubble. Ancient footprints are everywhere. From these opening moments, decadence lies heavy in the air, though opinions will vary whether Hill’s film is a rebellion against it--a challenge to comic complacency--or merely its latest by-product. READ MORE >>