The New Republic

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Slumdog Millionaire, Danny Boyle’s captivating new film, is structured as a riddle: How is it that 18-year-old Jamal (Dev Patel), a penniless orphan--i.e., “slumdog”--from the streets of Mumbai, could answer trivia question after trivia question correctly on the Indian version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” en route to a shot at the 20 million rupee jackpot? Is he a genius? Is he cheating? READ MORE >>

“Regardless of how this whole thing works out, I will be dying, and so will you, and so will everyone else here. And that’s what I’d like to explore.” These are the opening instructions that theater director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) offers a newly assembled cast in Charlie Kaufman’s film Synecdoche, New York. But they might just as easily serve as a warning to prospective moviegoers. READ MORE >>

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st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } Head cheerleader. Failed oilman. Air National Guard. Mano a mano. Traded Sammy Sosa. Turd Blossom. Is our children learning? Axis of Evil. Slam dunk. You break it, you own it. Shock and awe. Drain the swamp. Misunderestimated. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. Freedom fries. Mission Accomplished. The dark side. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice--you don’t get fooled again. READ MORE >>

Let’s begin with Anne Hathaway, because everyone else will. In Rachel Getting Married, the budding star adds a few pounds--I would not like to guess the relative contributions made by costume, prosthetics, and old-fashioned calories--and sports a black bob so rough it might have been pruned with gardening shears. Her wardrobe runs the full spectrum from black to dark gray and from baggy to baggier. She smokes constantly, cigarettes in cinema having seamlessly evolved from totems of style to badges of neurosis. READ MORE >>

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 nothing at all like the Crusades.) With Body of Lies, Scott once again turns his eye to conflict in the Middle East, though this time he wisely keeps his moral and historical frames in present-day alignment. READ MORE >>

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. His 2005 follow-up, The Constant Gardener, was very nearly the opposite: a somewhat silly global conspiracy thriller with a presentation as high-toned and laborious as a brochure from the World Health Organization. READ MORE >>

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 long would it take them to produce Eagle Eye? A week? A day? READ MORE >>