Bringing India To America And America To India

Two remakes of novel adaptations miss the mark.

A Last Word

Given this show's suspenseful premise and a talent list, Luck should be a sure thing. But the series appears to have fallen captive to the racing milieu, reveling so exhaustively in the arcana of stable routines, sweepstakes procedures, and betting lingo that story itself becomes an also-ran.

Poem

When work becomes a dirty word

In Hugo, Martin Scorsese offers an entertaining, if uneven tribute to Georges Méliès in the guise of a film for children. And My Week with Marilyn, which chronicles an unlikely, and brief friendship between Marilyn Monroe and a young man, is about half-good.

There comes a point, late in the new film The Mill and the Cross, when a dramatic question is asked (and fumbled) by a character who represents us. He is the urbane patron of the sixteenth-century Flemish painter Pieter Brueghel the Elder, and like the artist he sees a reign of terror being visited on his countrymen by the invading forces of the Spanish king, Philip II. In the film, Brueghel explains how the center point and axis of the painting will be Jesus, stumbling beneath his cross. Yet everyone else in this vast painting gazes elsewhere.

Fiction

The first thing to be said about J. Edgar, the biopic about the late FBI director, is that it is an unexpectedly forbearing, even pitying look at J. Edgar Hoover. The second: With pity like this, who needs calumny? Written by Dustin Lance Black and directed by Clint Eastwood, this movie turns out to be the negative complement of another biopic, Milk, also written by Black.

When book acknowledgments go wrong

At a recent panel discussion on the financial meltdown, I was startled to hear breathless stories along the lines of “Where I was when Lehman Bros. fell.” Didn’t they understand that for the rest of us, the fall of Lehman was not the moon landing? And that to speak of it in a jocular way might rankle those of us not in “financial services”? Margin Call, exploits the gap between these two perspectives, showing us the investment-banking bubble through the eyes of the lavishly paid insiders who were its engineers and beneficiaries.

 ‘Journey of the Universe’ on PBS

George Clooney's The Ides of March offers a clinical look at the political machinations that take place before the public can vote, and Moneyball, based on Michael Lewis’s nonfiction bestseller, shows how baseball teams get assembled prior to, and sometimes during, the playing season.

A tree grows in the Congo

The struggle against corruption in India

When ethicist Peter Singer’s name is mentioned by prolifers, it’s usually as a warning of where the logic of abortion leads. Some talk about him as if he were a kind of academic monster: the pure intellectual who has lost touch with his humanity. But can Christian ethicists talk with Peter Singer—and can he talk with them? Are they even intelligible to one another?

Umpiring ain't easy

It starts with food

If you find it all too easy to sneer at Protestant fundamentalist sects whose members display an enthusiasm during worship that resembles hysteria, you have to be grateful for such films as Tender Mercies, The Apostle, and now Vera Farmiga’s directorial debut, Higher Ground.

'Edge of Empires' at New York University

In Praise of South Carolina Baseball

It might seem odd to apply the term “understated” to a documentary that features gritty combat footage. But a quiet, poignant restraint is a key note of Hidden Battles, a graceful study of how the act of killing affects soldiers’ mental health.

The Difficult Genius of David Jones

What Jackie Kennedy’s Memoir Says About Her—And Us

An Interview with Ken Burns

Verse from the late poet

Reviews of new French films Point Blank & Sarah’s Key

Celebrated director Ken Burns and his partner, Lynn Novick, have crafted a brisk and absorbing film that brims with insights, not only into the broader cultural and economic forces that turned the United States—in theory—dry for thirteen years, but also into the episode’s long-term legacy.

When former President George W. Bush joins President Barack Obama at “Ground Zero” in lower Manhattan on September 11 to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the United States, the nation will be reminded, if only for a few hours, that the preservation of democracy requires real sacrifices and the willing embrace of duties, not just the pursuit of private interests and freedoms.

Learning to live with the in-laws

Remembering 9/11

Another Earth subordinates its futuristic elements to the familiar realities of loss, grief, and regret. This is the director's first film, and it's far from perfect. Neither is the reboot of Planet of the Apes. But neither film fails completely. 

The Legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.

Catholics find it increasingly difficult to sustain expectations of their church engaging & redeeming modernity. The problem is not simply that the institutional church today stands discredited, but that it has misconstrued the problem. The ramparts it persists in defending have long since been scaled, breached, and bypassed & have fallen into ruin.

An Undertaker’s Calling

If you took the DNA of Broadcast News and The Thirty-Nine Steps, added a pinch of Mad Men, and mixed it all together in an art deco cocktail shaker, you might get a refreshment very like The Hour, making its U.S. premiere on BBC America on August 17.

'The Tree of Life'

John Berryman's addresses to God

A short story

How not to talk about assisted suicide

'Do you know whether you’re having a boy or a girl?'

I should have been the ideal viewer for Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris. I had been writing a love letter to Paris in my heart years before I visited the city. Yet the movie ended up barely holding my attention.

And usually kept it to herself

Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams & the Italian mystery The Double Hour

Jane Eyre & Meek's Cutoff

On Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin’s painting The Silver Goblet

If you’re a fan of the History Channel, you’ll feel right at home watching Robert Redford’s recreation of Abraham Lincoln’s murder near the beginning of The Conspirator.

Identity politics in the United Kingdom

A review of 'In Search of Biblical Lands: From Jerusalem to Jordan in Nineteenth-century Photography,' on exhibit at the Getty Villa in Malibu, CA, through Sept. 12.

The poet's quarrel with himself & God

Why so few conservatives become professors

Letter from Japan

Synthetic biology & playing God

As Dorothy Day observed, events like the tsunami in Japan can easily be linked to the idea of “God as a tremendous Force, a frightening impersonal God, a Voice, a Hand stretched out to seize me, His child, and not in love.” Yet, as far as the Christian faith is concerned, that is never the whole story.

Mike Leigh’s 'Another Year'

The latest demonic possession movie, The Rite, is The Exorcist for sissies.

What can we do to prevent another Tucson?

Remembering Wilfrid Sheed

A review of the Cohen brothers' True Grit

Richard Alleva's & Rand Richards Cooper's reviews of the nominated films

“Hide/Seek” aims to reshape our understanding of the American artistic canon, placing gay aesthetics at its center rather than its margins.

The true costs of our prison system

Rochester's prodigal sons & daughters

Edmund Wilson's The Cold War & the Income Tax

'Black Swan,' 'The Fighter' & 'The King's Speech'

Waiting for "Superman" & Inside Job

PBS's 'The Calling'

The flight into Egypt has been a popular theme for artists for many centuries. The art has often been sublime, but the theology less so. The flight was by no means an idyllic excursion. It was a poor young family’s desperate escape from a tyrant king—an experience that has relevance for millions of refugees in today's world.

It’s in vogue to ask what the Internet is doing to our brains. Will constant exposure to technology destroy human memory and attention span? Are students really learning if they’re taking notes on their laptops, but keeping Facebook and e-mail windows open simultaneously, and also surreptitiously texting on their cell phones?

The ethics & economics of slum tours

Driving home from a college class every Wednesday in 1969, I would listen to an eight-track of the Beatles’ White Album. Whenever “Julia” came on, I felt bemused by its daringly monotonous tempo, the seesawing melody, and the lyrics, “Julia, Julia, ocean child, calls me / So I sing a song of love, Julia / Julia, seashell eyes, windy smile, calls me...” Was this an earthly lover whom John Lennon mourned or a daydream, a mermaid?

Clint Eastwood's Hereafter

The Indian media had a ball in the months leading up to the Commonwealth Games, hosted by India for the first time. Every major outlet weighed in, with stories about the mammoth waste involved, the staggering levels of corruption, and, most important, the organizing committee’s shocking ineptness.

The Museum of Biblical Art is not just a glorified Sunday school

A review of The Divine Sister, a loving sendup of convent pictures 

‘Wall Street 2’ & ‘The Social Network’

Christopher Lasch & the American predicament

A review of PBS's 'God in America'

'The Last Exorcism' & 'Devil'

This exhibit, which began in Washington, D.C., and will move to Minneapolis next month, documents how Klein’s remarkably fertile (and assertive) imagination anticipated minimalism, conceptualism, and later, even performance and installation art. 

A review of Get Low

No figure in the Christian pantheon except Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and John the Baptist has inspired, provoked, or confounded the imagination of painters more than the Magdalene. With the help of Scripture and artists, it may be possible to uncover a credible human being without so many of the dubious trappings.

 ‘Winter's Bone’ & ‘The Kids Are All Right’

'The Mourners: Tomb Sculptures from Burgundy'

Dante’s Inferno stands on its head in the mildly amusing, candy-colored series Neighbors from Hell, the first original primetime animated entertainment from the cable channel TBS.

Women’s varied struggles to shape their own lives are exemplified by three resolute Americans whose paths crisscrossed as they made their way through the patriarchy of nineteenth-century Massachusetts. Their stories are told in a trio of recent books that study the era’s intricate nexus of family, friendship, and class.

You’ve probably taken one of those “time release” capsules that administer medicine at intervals. Please Give is a time-release movie that provides information about its characters in stages, thus ensuring your complicated interest in them.

Fences won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for drama (Wilson’s first; he also won in 1990 for The Piano Lesson), and it is currently on Broadway in a splendid revival directed by Kenny Leon.

An interview with 2010 Laetare Medalist Dana Gioia

A review of “The Sacred Made Real” at the National Gallery of Art

If complex life is the marvel we all say it is, quite possibly unique to this planet, then meat is, so to speak, that marvel in its incarnate form. If the mind is the activity of the brain, this means only that the brain is capable of such lofty and astonishing things that their expression has been given the names mind, and soul, and spirit.

On interviewing Woody Allen

HBO looks at New Orleans in 'Treme'

Reviews of Shutter Island and The Ghost Writer

Hint: It's not Islam

An interview with filmmaker Woody Allen

If this film, which contrasts kindly abortion-clinic workers with loony prolife activists, is what passes for an evenhanded view of both sides of the abortion debate, prolifers still have a long way to go with the media.

Michael Haneke's new film is set in Eichwald, a fictional German village, in 1913. The village’s children will be in their thirties when Hitler comes to power. This timeline makes the violent events in Eichwald much more ominous, and raises the inevitable question: What kind of childhood created Nazis?

 ‘A Behanding in Spokane’

The highest praise I can pay Michael Hoffmann’s film The Last Station (based on a novel about Tolstoy by Jay Parini) is to say that it fulfills some of the excruciatingly tragic and excruciatingly comic possibilities of the subject.

A poem

What is it that so captivates us in portrayals of down-and-out artists, writers, and performers? Playing a creative type careening out of control tends to bring out the best in an actor—consider Michael Douglas in Wonder Boys, Nicholas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas, Paul Giamatti in Sideways. Add to this stellar list of losers Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart.

A review of The Lovely Bones and A Single Man

Graham Greene's anti-Americanism is essentially theological

For more than a year trailers have been promising that James Cameron’s Avatar would change the way we look at movies. No wonder the picture has broken all box-office records by earning more than a billion dollars within three weeks of its release. But has the promise been kept?

Up in the Air exudes the same jaunty, up-tempo cynicism that powered Jason Reitman's Thank You for Smoking. It’s fun to watch. Indeed, it’s so much fun that you have to wonder about Reitman as a satirist. Is he angry enough?

I bah-humbugged on the way to the box office but was surprised and conquered by the flexible faithfulness of Robert Zemeckis’s adaptation. Quite a bit of the Dickensian magic is preserved. Carrey’s vocal performance is at least serviceable, but it is Zemeckis’s visual brio that carries the day.

A short story translated by Joseph Cunneen

A review of Steven Soderbergh's film 'The Informant!'

A review of the films 'A Serious Man' and 'An Education'

What did you miss at Commonweal Conversations 2009?

Reviewing the 2008 film ’Brideshead Revisited.’

Unbelief in Ian McEwan's Fiction

A review of the films ’The Baader Meinhof Complex’ and ’The English Surgeon’

A review of the Oscar-contender ’The Hurt Locker’

A review of Michael Mann’s new film, ’Public Enemies’

The biggest obstacle to health-care reform is political escapism.

An original short story by the National Book Award-winning author of 'Charming Billy' (1998), the Pulitzer Prize finalists 'At Weddings and Wakes' (1992) and 'After This' (2006), and several other books.

A review of a new photography exhibit at the National Gallery

Reviewing "God of Carnage" and "August: Osage County."

  Reviewing "Irena’s Vow" on Broadway.

  On worshiping John Updike.

 Civilization & its discontents

  A review of new productions of "The Cherry Orchard" & "The Winter’s Tale"

  A review of David Mamet’s ’American Buffalo’ & ’Speed the Plow’

  A review of Mike Leigh’s film ’Happy-Go-Lucky’

  A review of Jonathan Demme’s latest film, ’Rachel Getting Married’

A review of two summer sequels: Indiana Jones & Prince Caspian.

  A review of the films ’Married Life’ and ’21’

The real auteur of the Coens’ new film is the novelist Cormac McCarthy.

A review of the Edward Hopper exhibit at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.

Will ’Michael Clayton’ bring Oscar nods for the first-time director and the star George Clooney?

Angelina Jolie shines in Michael Winterbottom’s ’A Mighty Heart.’

  Reviews of the independent films ’Once’ and ’La Vie en Rose’

Roberto Bolaño’s defiant fiction.

When a movie about Alzheimer’s isn’t all about Alzheimer’s.

  ’Into Great Silence’ & profound evil

Is ’Amazing Grace’ too tidy a rendering of a complex chapter of England’s history?

Is Tom Stoppard’s latest epic play the masterpiece it’s cracked up to be?

Two Oscar contenders provide unexpected perspectives on historical events.

Why the hard-to-look-at ’Glitter & Doom’ is an art exhibit you can’t afford to miss.

  Is there any hope for Tony and his families? Will there be redemption in New Jersey?

Director Alfonso Cuaron’s harsh vision of a future without babies, a world without hope.

With Oscar season upon us, it’s time, once again, to feel Mel Gibson’s pain.

Two very different movies from the other side of the pond: Borat & The Queen.

Is Clint Eastwood’s ’Flags of Our Fathers’ good? Yes. A masterpiece? Not so much.

  Why everything to love about Martin Scorsese’s latest film, ’The Departed,’ is just too much.

Do murder- mystery flicks ’Hollywoodland’ and ’The Black Dahlia’ soar or wilt?

Are we ready for another 9/11 movie? We have been since 9/12.

Exploring the strange creatures of the films ’The Descent’ and ’Little Miss Sunshine.’

What happens when National Public Radio goes to the movies?

Kyra Sedgwick channels Helen Mirren in TNT’s "The Closer."

A failed movie that doesn’t even have the courage of its own scandal.

Viewing the Holocaust through the eyes of a fourteen-year-old.

  An exclusive look inside the late Muriel Spark’s unpublished novel.

With his new film, Woody Allen scores an unexpected triumph by unveiling a new stroke no one knew he had. Rand Richards Cooper reviews.

  Brokeback Mountain will win the best-picture Oscar this year but for the wrong reason. Academy members will vote for it because they regard it as a gay movie that did great box office. But Brokeback Mountain is not a gay movie. This superb work of art is about the tragedy of emotional apartheid, and none of us, no matter our sexual orientation, is ever safe from the way life conspires to make us put our hearts on ice. Richard Alleva reviews.

  A footnote to those year-in-review roundups from 2005: Let’s hand a laurel to Brooks Brothers, the upscale clothier, for its contribution to political satire. I’m talking about those natty suits and ties worn (according to program credits) by Stephen Colbert in the inspired Comedy Central satire The Colbert Report, which began airing last October.

If nothing else, Andrew Adamson’s adaption gets the pictures right. Richard Alleva reviews.

In the 1430s, when Fra Angelico was at the peak of his career, he composed a three-panel painting of the Last Judgment. The left panel, Paradise, shows angels dancing through a flowering meadow as they lead the redeemed toward paradise. There is a soaring of the spirit in this lyrical painting. Heaven is seen as a great dance that all the faithful are invited to attend. Standing before this work one wants to dance and kneel at the same time. Leo O’Donovan reviews.

In an era that has made a catchphrase of the term “family values,” it’s no surprise that a few new TV hits capitalize shamelessly on the theme of kinship. ABC’s schmaltzy woman-president drama Commander in Chief may have practically nothing in common with Fox’s thriller Prison Break, or UPN’s hilarious sitcom Everybody Hates Chris, but all three shows give new meaning to the maxim that home is where the heart is.

"Arrow shirts, furrowed brows, steely replies, and the Hemingway ethos of coolness-under-fire abound in Good Night, and Good Luck, George Clooney’s depiction of the televised joust between the newscaster Edward R. Murrow and Senator Joseph McCarthy. Photographed by Robert Elswit in black-and-white so stark that realism crosses over into Andy Warholian pop realism, this movie presents the CBS news bureau of 1953 as the epitome of buttoned-down Eisenhower-era sobriety, though fired up by patriotism and liberal machismo." Richard Alleva reviews.

Just my luck. I’m trying to come to grips with the most unsettling American film produced in several years, while circumstances dictate a deadline that nearly keeps me from thinking about the movie-much less writing about it. So please regard all that follows, not as a formal critique, but as “Notes toward the Definition of A History of Violence,” a film written by Josh Olson and directed by David Cronenberg.

  ’The Constant Gardener’ takes idealism and makes it sexy. Reviewed by Rand Richards Cooper.

  Bill Murray was the first movie comedian since W. C. Fields to make cold contempt hip and attractive. For both performers the world was enemy. Fields squinted at it suspiciously but Murray’s gaze never concealed its open contempt. The Murray stare said, “Yes, if you feel you have just made an utter and eternal ass of yourself, trust that intuition completely.”

  How Tim Burton’s ’Charlie’ is true to Dahl’s vision, and Spielberg’s ’War of the World’ doesn’t stay true to his own. Reviewed by Richard Alleva.

Was Shakespeare a papist? Clare Asquith argues that the bard’s plays contained hidden Catholic messages.

How does a low-budget indie flick like ’Crash’ manage the same level of superficiality as a blockbuster like Ridley Scott’s ’Kingdom of Heaven’? Richard Alleva reviews.

Downfall takes us into Hitler’s bunker, a circle of hell Dante would have relished. Richard Alleva reviews.

Is Million Dollar Baby a film about assisted suicide? Maurice Timothy Reidy on Eastwood’s latest film.

Utter the words “theatrical” and “trial” these days, and four-fifths of the populace will think of Michael Jackson. But a world away from that media circus, an off-Broadway theater has been giving the concept of courtroom theater a far different and more high-minded spin. Within the space of a week, in February, New York’s Public Theater opened The Controversy of Valladolid, by Jean-Claude Carrière, and The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, by Stephen Adly Guirgis-two noteworthy dramas that use the scenario of a tribunal to probe the mysteries of creation and salvation.

We all know which movies to watch for Christmas, but what about Easter? Richard Alleva recommends the films of Danish director Carl Dreyer.

It may seem pointless, and in a lovely way it is, to install a series of frames containing large hanging saffron rectangles over twenty-three miles of Central Park pathways. But after years of trying, in February the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude managed to bring it off. Called The Gates, the project involved the installation of 7,532 frames, and the fabric was hung so high that the tallest people could walk along the paths easily. The money was raised by the artists, and much of it went to pay those who installed the work, and to pay monitors who directed people to interesting routes and also used poles to unfurl banners tangled by the wind.

Is ABC’s Lost a vision of Purgatory? That has been a topic of passionate discussion on Internet bulletin boards relating to the new hit drama, currently airing Wednesday evenings. To be sure, it’s not the only theory that obsessed viewers have advanced about the series, a tantalizing portrait of survivors coping with life on a mysterious island after their plane has crashed. The characters-who include an ethereal-looking female bank robber; a former Iraqi soldier; a sulky African-American child who may have telekinetic abilities; and a paraplegic who has just miraculously regained the use of his legs-may be stuck in a time warp, some fans argue. Or they may just be dead. Or perhaps there’s a rational explanation for the freakish goings on in this isolated tropical spot, which is apparently the home to rampaging polar bears and to an even more lethal monster, whose nature has not yet been revealed.

Rand Richards Cooper on Nicole Kassell’s gritty and disturbing debut film.

If you could set a play inside George Stephanopoulos’s mind, and send in a German John Le Carre to do a little reupholstering, you might end up with a script like Michael Frayn’s Democracy, one of the most highly praised plays to hit Broadway this season. A provocative and witty account of the spy scandal that felled the government of West German chancellor Willy Brandt in the 1970s, Democracy scored a slew of British awards when it opened in London in 2003, and American theater mavens waited with bated breath to see if it would repeat the stateside success of Frayn’s scientific puzzler Copenhagen, which won the Tony for best play in 2000.

Hotel Rwanda offers a tantalizing portrayal of heroism. Million Dollar Baby represents violence as tragic rather than cathartic.

Ray revives the biopic in all its raciness; Kinsey harks back to the “good films-good citizenship” screen biographies of the 1930s.

Duccio di Buoninsegna (c. 1255-1319) is not as well known as other Italian painters, so it came as a surprise to some that the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York purchased the Madonna and Child for a reported $45 million late last year. That’s more than twice what the Met has paid for any other painting, but it is worth it. Duccio is one of the pioneers of Western Art, and his Madonna and Child was copied by artists for generations.

  Sideways has created some surprising Best Picture buzz—surprising, because Oscar rarely smiles on small movies with loser protagonists. Rand Richards Cooper reviews.

"What caught me off guard about The Incredibles is how much beauty there is in this movie." Richard Alleva reviews.

Mike Leigh’s new film isn’t as politically correct as the critics would have you believe. Rand Richards Cooper reviews.

"The Motorcycle Diaries is about a sensitive, intelligent, and doomed youth named Er­n­e­sto Guevara, and the movie itself is sensitive, intelligent, and doomed."

"Musicals blow the dust off the soul,” Mel Brooks remarks in the first moments of Broadway: The American Musical, tossing out an exuberant metaphor well suited to this terrific PBS documentary, which blasts the dust off priceless show-biz anecdotes and bits of historical footage chronicling the quintessential American art form. Celia Wren reviews.

The Chinese movie epic, Hero, is more than spectacular; it is elemental.

"Director Jon­a­than Demme has transformed the classic cold-war pulp thriller into a fictional sibling of Fahrenheit 9/11."

Fahrenheit 9/11 is a brilliant piece of propaganda; Control Room presents a "substantial clash of opinions."

What could possibly be wrong with a movie directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Hanks? Plenty.

"Sometimes too much just isn’t enough. That was the only conclusion to draw from some of the wild flights of fancy that skidded to a landing on Broadway this spring." From Stoppard to Bollywood, stage critic Celia Wren rounds up the latest on the Great White Way.

"In an era in which the idea of winning has transfixed America’s imagination and imperiled its soul, the Red Sox remind us that life is a trial."

Robert McNamara & The Fog of War

  Now that the cycle is finished, how do the films hold up?

That war is hell must always be a profounder fact than war is romance; nevertheless, war goes on being romance.

A profile of the 2010 Laetare Medalist

What does the pope have to learn from ’Buffy the Vampire Slayer’? A lot, it turns out—especially about "the new feminism." Cathleen Kaveny reports.

"Strictly speaking, Troy isn’t an adaptation of The Iliad." What is it then?

Just how anti can an antihero be? Rand Richards Cooper reviews the devilish comic-book adaptations of The Punisher and Hellboy.

"Dublin or Duibh linn, as the name is written in the ancient annals, means a black pool. The name has a certain psychological resonance, for Joyce pioneered an artistic way into the underground darkness of the unconscious. "

June 16, 1904, the day on which James Joyce’s Ulysses takes place, unfolded in near literary perfection. A century later, Joyce scholar Robert H. Bell and Irish author Mark Patrick Hederman celebrate Joyce’s legacy as Bloomsday turns one hundred.

What is it about The Passion of the Christ that appeals to young people? Mark Bosco explains.

Is it possible for the Met to top its last exhibition of Orthodox works of art? Yes, says Orthodox priest and Commonweal columnist John Garvey.

  How does the latest mindbender from screenwriter Charlie Kaufmann stand up to his previous works? Among his best, reports movie critic Rand Richards Cooper. Also: When does reenactment work on film? In the gripping rescue story of Touching the Void.

How do you like your movie violence?

"Has Mel Gibson’s passion resulted in a truly dramatic work of art? I think not."