« September 2007 | Main | January 2008 »

December 21, 2007

Romance & Cigarettes

(out of four)

John Turturro's Romance & Cigarettes is a labor of love (and that doesn't even count the Sisyphean two-year challenge the director faced in actually getting the movie in front of audiences). That's because his creation tackles love in all its banal forms — a married man (James Gandolfini) stepping out with a younger lady (Kate Winslet), the man's devoted wife (Susan Sarandon) willing to humor any fault of his but this and the teenage daughter (Mandy Moore) head-over-heels for a neighborhood tomcat (Bobby Cannavale) — each one presented with such fresh intelligence you'd never guess the subject had already surfaced in a million other movies.

Continue reading "Romance & Cigarettes"

Posted by Peter Debruge at 05:01 PM | Comments (0)

National Treasure: Book of Secrets

(out of four)

At some point in the future, film scholars will look back and label this as the era of intense leading men, with Tom Cruise and Nicolas Cage as prime examples. Both men act as though they're gripping high-voltage cables between their teeth, which, in the case of the National Treasure franchise, is certainly a curious choice. Does bug-eyed intensity really mesh with Indiana Jones-meets-The Da Vinci Code-style historical fetishism?

It's a good thing Cage's character, Benjamin Franklin Gates, is a patriot, because he seems to have no trouble getting in and out of the world's most protected spots, from the queen's private chambers in Buckingham Palace to the Oval Office. Not even the highest-security room at the Library of Congress can deter him, even though it protects a book of incalculable value.

Continue reading "National Treasure: Book of Secrets"

Posted by Peter Debruge at 10:15 AM | Comments (0)