The New Republic

After the title Reality, the next thing we see is a gilded carriage drawn by two white horses rolling through the Italian countryside. Soon it turns in through huge gates opened by servants in eighteenth-century costume. The carriage has arrived at a huge villa with lovely grounds filled with festivating people in modern dress. The carriage has brought a bride and groom to their wedding party. READ MORE >>

Where was room 237, and why would you want to avoid it? On the other hand, why might you be drawn to it against all your better instincts and at risk of your sanity? Room 237 is part of a large, deserted hotel that feels slightly old-fashioned, but it’s spacious and clean—it shines like a polished knife—and the views from the picture windows are to die for. Despite its lack of trade, you are entirely provided for. The kitchens and the pantries are stocked with food. The heating works. READ MORE >>

On October 22, 1950, John Ford sat in an aisle seat in the Beverly Hills Hotel’s Crystal Room for a meeting of 300-plus members of the Screen Directors Guild. He had a lot on his mind. His new western would be out in a few weeks. By then, he’d be in Ireland on a location scout for his next film, a dream project 15 years in the making. Naturally, the studio was already nickel-and-diming him. There was also a trip to Korea planned for January, to film a navy documentary. READ MORE >>

Why is it called Stoker? Is this some optimistic reaching for the moods of Bram Stoker and a signal that there will be blood? Or was the enterprise fearful that the full name of the central character, India Stoker, was loaded with misleading suggestions? READ MORE >>

The World According To Dick Cheney, a documentary that airs March 15 on Showtime, includes so fine an acoustical solo performance by its subject that it could be titled Dick Cheney Unplugged. Listening to Cheney’s quiet, calm voice, Nicholas Lemann observed a dozen years ago in the New Yorker, was like READ MORE >>

If Dead Man Down were a horse, you’d shoot it after 20 minutes.When I saw it, people were variously texting, eating a substantial meal, sleeping, and doing their taxes. One man laughed, and it became the most interesting thing going on, for it did not seem to depend on the movie’s lines or situations. Rather, the laugh was like a cough he could not control. READ MORE >>

Renoir is the film’s title, but it might as well be plural. It seems to promise a film about Jean Renoir just because it is a film, but it turns out to be about two Renoirs: Jean and his father Pierre-Auguste, the great Impressionist painter. It is also, to an equal share, about a young woman called Dédé who is seen in the very opening shot bicycling along a sunny road. This sequence is a tip of the hat to modern French film. READ MORE >>

Here’s an oddity, from Yahoo Movies this past Monday: two photographs, side by side—a dark-haired woman, apparently 23-years-old, in a belted red raincoat, standing in front of a wall covered with Jewish imagery; and then, a child, 3-years-old, in a red coat, but in the foreground of a black-and-white picture that shows German soldiers guarding abashed citizens. It is the same person in both pictures, Oliwia Dabrowska, from Krakow in Poland. READ MORE >>

Within the first few minutes of David Fincher’s anxious new political drama “House of Cards,” we meet Zoe Barnes, an enterprising young journalist working at the fictional Washington Herald. She’s in a face-off with a seasoned editor, begging him: “Move me online.” She wears a hoodie and jeans; he’s sporting a suit. "I’ll go underground. Back rooms. The urinals. I’ll win over staff members on the Hill.”  READ MORE >>

When some of us were very young, the battle was fought to reveal female breasts in American movies. It had been alluded to in the 1920s and early ’30s with sheer silk chemises (say those three words over and over again—they are as potent as Viagra). READ MORE >>