| Critic |
Review |
Quote |
Analysis |
This Week's Verdict |
Manohla Dargis,
The New York Times |
Lions for Lambs |
"Those who remain shocked, shocked that elected officials, certain journalists and cosseted college students sat idly by, huffing Hummer fumes and nodding out on 24/7 infotainment (all Britney, all the time), while the administration led the charge, first into Afghanistan and then into Iraq, may find much to embrace here. Everyone else will continue to nod out or resume banging their heads against the wall in bloody frustration." |
Irony-deficient, well-intentioned Hollywood earnestness never goes out of style. Neither do big cars and sad blondes.
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Stephanie Zacharek,
Salon.com |
Lions for Lambs |
"Cruise's performance here is interesting, if not good, and the movie doesn't cast him as a cut-and-dried villain: He's a nightmare right-wing version of John Edwards, as if Edwards' casual likeability and lawyer's showmanship had been turned up several notches to a blinding level of brightness. And Cruise is simply well-suited to play a slick politician: This is one area where being a grown man with blazing-white chipmunk teeth is an asset." |
This five-line parenthesis is the most prescient part of the review. One of the bigger questions of our age is: Why do so few people mock John Edwards?
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J. Hoberman,
The Village Voice |
Southland Tales |
"The political phantasmagoria unfolds — mainly around Venice Beach and the Santa Monica pier — in an alternately pre- and post-apocalyptic universe in which Abilene, Texas, was nuked on July 5, 2005. Since then, oil prices have spiked and an absurd German multinational has figured out how to produce energy — along with a new psychedelic drug — from the ocean. The draft is back; war has spread to Syria." |
Is it cause for concern that the most far-fetched aspect of these scenarios is the Texas location of the bomb-blast? (God forbid, of course.)
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Armond White,
New York Press |
No Country for Old Men |
"You know what national cataclysm happened since then, so it should be no surprise that the Coens have made a crime movie that seems quietly aghast at the likelihood of death and menace occurring on American soil. Unlike American Gangster's sensationalized crap, this is a crime movie/western exercise that contemporizes the miasma of a world at war." |
It's national trauma-and-malaise awareness week in movie land.
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Kenneth Turan,
L.A. Times |
No Country for Old Men |
"With No Country for Old Men, the Coen brothers drop the mask. They've put violence on screen before, lots of it, but not like this. Not anything like this." |
Four words: Sock in wood chipper.
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