The New Republic

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 >>

Imagine the production values of "Downton Abbey" aimed at a grown-up audience. Think of a movie being five hours long, but made for television. Consider the possibility that after the feeble adaptation he did recently for Anna Karenina, Tom Stoppard has fashioned a script with his customary wit and cunning. Just wait for the babble of the awards season to die, and prepare for an event in television history and a real British movie. READ MORE >>

The video-game industry, which has been in a fight with the gun lobby to deflect blame for the Sandy Hook massacre, could use some positive press in Washington these days. So Electronic Arts, which makes first-person shooter games like Medal of Honor and Battlefield, did what any company looking for an image boost would do: Get the eminently wholesome John Legend to headline an invite-only inauguration after party on the top floor of the W Hotel, and highlight a game that doesn’t revolve around shooting people.While Legend passed the time with supermodel co-host Malin Ackerman in a VIP section at the rear of the dark room, and the crowd noshed on gussied-up chicken and waffles while glancing surreptitiously at Grover Norquist (who seemed to enjoy the attention), I pursued the ostensible purpose of the event: promotion of the latest edition of “SimCity,” which EA is using as a bridge to D.C. wonks.In a corner of the room, as I peered at a computer displaying a virtual town, a woman asked if I'd had a chance to play it. She pulled over her husband, who'd designed it and flown out from San Francisco to show it off. He asked if I wanted to try it out.I could spend the night gawking at mayors-about-town Michael Nutter, Antonio Villaraigosa, and Cory Booker. Or I could pretend to be a mayor myself. READ MORE >>