The New Republic

Side effects: It’s a curious term, suggesting an assured central purpose, with some collateral consequences—like you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs? Or is it possible that “side effects” is a delusional escape clause, that all effects are part of each other? A side effect may make you ill; but you were sick already. READ MORE >>

There is a new shot in the movies and it deserves attention. In truth, it has been around for some time, but meaning can take a while to sink in. The first time I felt its possibility was in the late ’50s, reading Norman Mailer’s The Deer Park. The narrator of that novel is Sergius O’Shaughnessy, who has been a first lieutenant in the Air Force. Stationed in Tokyo, he performed over Korea. “Sometimes on tactical missions we would lay fire bombs into Oriental villages. READ MORE >>

So there I was the other evening, mulling over the oddities of Argo and Zero Dark Thirty and wondering if the affection for Ben Affleck could get his strange movie to be Best Picture, when a lot of truths were revealed to me. READ MORE >>

Lore, not the English word for a body of tradition but the German female name, is the title. The film is set in northern Germany, mid-1945. The war is just ending. The German people are the subject, as seen through only a few of them. Lore is the teenage daughter, about sixteen, of an SS officer and his equally Nazi wife. We are going to meet a few of the cheering thousands we saw in newsreels, now that the cheering is over. READ MORE >>

How highly improbable that, of all the working Hollywood directors—the grandiose (James Cameron) and the action-addicted (Ridley Scott), the melodramatic (Steven Spielberg) and the blood-obsessed (Quentin Tarantino), the grizzled (Clint Eastwood) and the conspiratorial (Oliver Stone)—Kathryn Bigelow should be the one to best channel the global war on terror. READ MORE >>

James Franco, that jack of all media, is on yet another artistic mission: The star of the soon-to-be-released Disney film Oz: The Great and Powerful is hell-bent on bringing gay sex into mainstream Hollywood cinema. Adding to an already considerable oeuvre of gay-themed projects such as Sal, Howl, Milk, and The Feast of Stephen, Franco and co-director Travis Matthews’s Interior. READ MORE >>

The Taviani brothers, Paolo and Vittorio, have been making films since 1962; their work, almost always in Italy, has almost always been innovative, intense, and involved with social and political subjects. Sometimes they have not always been able to control the strength they summoned, but their films have mattered. When I learned that they were making a film of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, I was doubly alerted. READ MORE >>

All right, I’m ready to go quietly; well, not quite quietly; still, I am prepared to surrender. If I had ever been a member of any of the circles of film critics, I would abjure that allegiance now. Deport me if you like: I will share an open boat with Piers Morgan. We can interview each other as we row across the Atlantic. But I do not want to have to see Al Pacino playing Joe Paterno. READ MORE >>

It wasn't so long ago that Alec Baldwin—his never-all-that-imposing days as a leading man well behind him—was just another Hollywood dolt with a waning grip on our attention and an apparently well-deserved reputation as an arrogant putz. However you define "cultural cachet" in the 21st-century infotainment thunderdome, betting on him to achieve it would have made predicting a Newt Gingrich inaugural seem like the consensus opinion of reasonable people everywhere. READ MORE >>

In 1990, when I saw a documentary about the Guarneri Quartet, I concluded that all of us who are not members of a quartet have wasted our lives. The film made it seem that playing in a quartet is the most continually progressive and congenial way to spend a life in art. At last comes another film about a quartet, this time fictional. Musically, it isn’t in a class with the documentary, but it investigates other aspects that result from their long union. READ MORE >>