Gus Van Sant, reverting to the vein of Good Will Hunting, goes all soft and squishy (don't be fooled by the scruffy surface) with the tall tale of another youthful genius, a black high-school athlete and closet littérateur (diffident newcomer Rob Brown) who finds a mentor in an irascible old …
Come for the metal, stay for the mettle. Because as only-American-to-win-LeMans Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) tells you at the outset, once you get your snarling, straining beast of a race car up over 7000 rpms, you go to the Race Place, where everything fades away and you’re left with the …
Matt Damon and Christian Bale star as car designer and driver in James Mangold's high octane (we hope) biopic.
Trust Walter Hill, a nose-to-the-grindstone action director, to resist the lure of the Big Theme. Of course you can, if you really want to, hear some echoes of the Vietnam War (best traceable to co-scriptwriter John Milius) in the futile and costly pursuit of indigenous guerrillas. And there are some …
Gus Van Sant's self-imposed penance for the commercial indulgences of his Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester and, in between those two, the Psycho remake: a laid-back survival tale, a stripped-down Walkabout, about two hiking buddies (Matt Damon, Casey Affleck) who take a wrong turn on the Wilderness Trail and …
Espionage epic, reasonably described by one blurbist as "The Godfather of CIA movies," but only if you are satisfied to retain all the pretentiousness of The Godfather, right down to the oppressive underillumination, and do without any of the enlivening pyrotechnics. (Despite those subtractions, the movie still comes to within …
There is a story, oft told, behind the story on screen. On-the-make actors Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, best friends since grade school, wrote the script for themselves to act in. There's more to it than that, but it doesn't get more interesting, and nor does the story on screen, …
Director Zhang Yimou enlists the friendly All-American face of Matt Damon to entice multiplex audiences to embrace subtitles, the glories of Chinese civilization, and the coming wave of Chinese cinema. (Damon’s face, scowly and granitic, is up to the task, his slippery accent isn’t.) The story feels American as well; …
Topical war film feeds off and into the widespread cynicism, which is to say the widespread enlightenment, as to the motives behind the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Matt Damon, maturing into an actor of spartan economy and vigilant interiority, plays the army officer charged with running down the …
Here is your chance to see a penguin pee upside down, to hear Brad Pitt and Matt Damon as brave krill eager to escape the swarm (“Goodbye, krill world”), and to hear a kid penguin sing a Puccini aria with lyrics such as, “Life’s just a big pile of crazy.” …
Clint Eastwood’s first venture into the supernatural, structured in three distinct, interwoven, and, we may presume, converging storylines, dealing directly with the subject of death and beyond. The screenplay by Peter Morgan, known for such docudramas as The Queen and Frost/Nixon, touches upon, gives voice to, a variety of common …
Steven Soderbergh, working from fact, details an impenetrable case of corporate skullduggery blown open by an ambiguous black-hatted whistleblower: a kind of anti-Hitchcock suspense comedy, grudgingly putting any cards at all on the table, keeping the surprises coming only by keeping us in the dark, flouting the Master's tried-and-true method …
High-dudgeon documentary, concise, lucid, and loaded, on the economic nosedive of 2008: “This crisis was not an accident.” Writer and director Charles Ferguson succeeds in whipping up disgust and outrage even while he fails at fighting off strained brains and glazed eyes: “derivatives,” “leverage,” “collateralized debt obligations,” “credit default swaps,” …
Remember when your high school teacher would wheel out a 16mm projector and proceed to put the class to sleep with hopelessly unengaging educational films? That at least offered students a vacation from science class, which is more than can be said for the fate of audiences attending Christopher Nolan’s …
Doubtless not the sort of project that fans of director Clint Eastwood want from him, a Big Statement, no matter how characteristically understated. Marrying elements of the Great Man biography and the inspirational true sports story, it tells of Nelson Mandela’s first years as the first black president of South …