The New Republic

There is a new Iron Man movie opening this month, which means we are being subjected to the force of nature that is the Robert Downey Jr. publicity tour. By now, his persona is familiar: debonair, insouciant, and lovably arrogant, in a faintly bemused kind of way. READ MORE >>

At last. A documentary that I didn’t even know I was waiting for. READ MORE >>

It was only in the late 1920s, just as sound came in, that Hollywood realized its audience had achieved a demographic balance: there were as many people living in the cities as in the country. Today it’s nearly five to one in favor of cities. That shift helps to account for the decrease in rural films. Sound meant talk, gunfire, and music, and those generally were urban attributes. The Western seems rural, but it is more interested in epic space and a moral stage than actual country life. READ MORE >>

The Driskill Hotel, a Romanesque brick and limestone hulk at the corner of Old Pecan and Brazos streets in downtown Austin, is the closest thing the Texas capital has to old-world glamour. The hotel also happens to be haunted, supposedly, by the ghost of the man whose portrait hangs at the stairs to the bar just off the lobby: Colonel Jesse Driskill, a cattle baron who made a fortune during and after the Civil War peddling longhorn to a famine-stricken region. READ MORE >>

If you don’t know that Gatsby is coming (again), then Warner Brothers might as well give up now. READ MORE >>

So who is green-lighting these end-of-the-world movies that just keep coming—Oblivion, After Earth, Star Trek Into Darkness, Olympus Has Fallen, White House Down, World War Z, Pacific Rim? Is it the triumvirate of David Stockman, Paul Krugman, and Kim Jong-un? I grant that Armageddon has been a recurring theme on screen. READ MORE >>

“This blog has become a venue for my truths," Roger Ebert wrote in 2011 on his website, a must-read for those of us who loved the voice Ebert found once cancer robbed him of his ability to speak. READ MORE >>

The French director-writer François Ozon once made a memorable film called Swimming Pool, in which a parched writer was strengthened by contact with another person. Now he makes In the House, where an encounter with imagination again enlivens a writer, and entails danger. READ MORE >>

It is characteristic of Roger Ebert, speechless for some years, that he should take his life departure just a day after admitting that he would have to drop down from doing 300 reviews a year. I daresay that rate of work was some compensation for not being able to talk, retort, tease, laugh, and snort. Ebert was a big man in every way who had charged through so many obstacles. The first of those was that he continued to write when beset by complicated and disfiguring cancers. READ MORE >>

Movies have a rhythm: It can come in the editing or the re-working of old riffs, in the story structure and the pace of the talk. Once it derived from twenty-four frames a second. But brave movies can change their own rhythms. READ MORE >>