2009-03-20

Off With...

Off With the Bankers
By SIMON JOHNSON and JAMES KWAK
Published: March 19, 2009

A.I.G. can hardly claim that its generous bonuses attract the best and the brightest. So instead, it defends the payments by arguing they’re needed to retain employees who are crucial for winding down transactions that are “difficult to understand and manage.” In other words, only the people who stuck the knife into the American International Group can neatly extract it for a decent burial. More

Duplicity, with Julia Roberts and Clive Owen as opposing players; the movie, directed by Tony Gilroy, opens on Friday nationwide.
March 20, 2009
Effervescent Espionage With Two Irresistible Forces
By A. O. SCOTT
Published: March 20, 2009

“Duplicity”: the title suggests something with two sides, but the film itself, the second (after “Michael Clayton”) written and directed by Tony Gilroy, has many more layers and facets. Its densely coiled plot and splintered chronology reveal a cascade of familiar genres and styles. It’s a caper movie, a love story — with Clive Owen and Julia Roberts, no less — an extra-dry corporate satire. However you describe it, “Duplicity” is superior entertainment, the most elegantly pleasurable movie of its kind to come around in a very long time. More

Hunger (2008)

Michael Fassbender plays Bobby Sands, a member of the Irish Republican Army held in the Maze prison in 1981, in “Hunger.”
The High Cost of Dignity: Recalling the Troubles in Stark Detail
By A. O. SCOTT
Published: March 20, 2009

With calm, deliberate attention — an approach at once compassionate and dispassionate — “Hunger” explores physical extremity and political extremism. In recreating the atmosphere at the Maze prison in Northern Ireland, where Irish Republican Army militants waged a series of protests against the British authorities in 1981, Steve McQueen, a Turner Prize-winning visual artist and first-time filmmaker, finds an almost uncanny balance of violence and quiet. The brutality in the film is pervasive and often stomach turningly graphic, but what is perhaps most unnerving is the tact, patience and care with which Mr. McQueen depicts its causes and effects. More

Knowing (2009)

Nicolas Cage as an astrophysicist trying to save the world in “Knowing,” directed by Alex Proyas.
Extinction Looms! Stop the Aliens!
By A. O. SCOTT
Published: March 20, 2009

Nobody requires plausibility from a movie like “Knowing,” which features slender blond aliens, intimations of apocalypse, clairvoyant children and Nicolas Cage as an astrophysicist. If the thing manages to avoid complete preposterousness, the audience can still have a good time. More

The New Twenty (2008)

Andrew Wei Lin and Bill Sage in "The New Twenty."
Late-Capitalist Malaise in New York
By NATHAN LEE
Published: March 20, 2009

The yuppies of “The New Twenty” are not an especially sympathetic bunch. Andrew (Ryan Locke) and Julie (Nicole Bilderback) are precollapse Wall Street types engaged to be married. He’s competitive and short-tempered, even more so after going into business with an arrogant venture capitalist (Terry Serpico). She’s a highly successful financier who worries that her status comes from being the token “hot Asian chick” at her bank. More

All the Pretty Delusions

All the Pretty Delusions
Justin Whalin as Ed Gruberman in "Super Capers."
By NATHAN LEE
Published: March 20, 2009

There are bad movies and terrible movies, and movies so inexplicably, aggressively awful that your only possible response is to stare stupefied at the screen and ask yourself how such a fiasco could have come into existence. More

Steam

Strangers Who Sweat Together
By JEANNETTE CATSOULIS
Published: March 20, 2009

Three women, three generations, one problem: “Steam,” a movie so cheesy and so poorly acted that it should never have seen the light of day. More

Valentino: The Last Emperor (2008)

Valentino surrounded by his models and pet pugs in a scene from the documentary “Valentino: The Last Emperor.”
Portrait of a Fashion King: Palazzos, Pugs and Peons
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Published: March 18, 2009

Short, majestically coiffed, with hooded eyes, an orange-tinted tan and the peevish impatience of an absolute monarch: that is Valentino Garavani, the Italian couturier known simply as Valentino, as he appears in Matt Tyrnauer’s documentary portrait, “Valentino: The Last Emperor.” Watching the movie is a little like gorging on chocolate and Champagne until that queasy moment arrives when you realize you’ve consumed far too much. More