Actor
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The Return of the Gladiator December 05, 2024
Sir Ridley Scott is on a losing streak. Last year’s Napoleon fell badly flat. This year’s equally hyped sequel to his sword-and-sandals masterpiece, Gladiator, is faring little better. Gladiator II is not a particularly good movie. It suffers from a ...
Jesse Eisenberg Is the Man for Our Anxious Moment December 05, 2024
Jesse Eisenberg is worried about his anxiety levels. Take today, for example. By lunchtime, his mind is already crawling with the brainworms of what might go wrong. As I waited to meet him at the East Village restaurant Little Poland, I spotted Eisen...
The Original Sigma Male October 29, 2024
When Alain Delon died this August, I happened to be in France. I can’t say I was paying much attention to the news. How was he mourned in the papers? I have no idea. But I do remember feeling this strange sensation that, dead or alive, the actor’s fi...
If You Can’t Change the World October 29, 2024
YOU DON’T GET movies like Megalopolis every century. That was the gist of the coverage surrounding the production and release of 85-year-old Francis Ford Coppola’s bizarre new epic. The film, which Coppola has been developing for over four decades, h...
The Best Vineyards in the World October 23, 2024
The October 15 issue of the Wine Spectator carries two intriguing features. The first is a series of reports, with lavish photographs, on “The World’s Greatest Vineyards.” This list of ten superstars is followed by a cast of twenty supporting actors,...
Stanley Tucci Takes Nothing for Granted October 23, 2024
There are a few things Stanley Tucci has learned in his more than 40 years of acting onscreen. He hates waiting around. He tends to overthink his roles. He knows his feelings about his performance matter far less than those of the viewer. “I just wan...
Why Celebrities Stopped Being Cool October 21, 2024
When I was growing up, “cool” was everything. The musicians, actors, writers, and talking heads we idolized and tried to imitate were outspoken, often on drugs, and sometimes straight-up bad people. I recognize that it was a simpler time before socia...
Finally, a Good Trump Movie October 18, 2024
Since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, he has been depicted on-screen many times, but never very well.Alec Baldwin was inexplicably cast to play him on Saturday Night Live for the entirety of Trump’s presidency. But even if Baldwin had been capable o...
Frank Sinatra Gets Whacked October 17, 2024
Cineasts everywhere will be disappointed by the latest news from Martin Scorsese, surely the world’s greatest living director. Not only has he announced that his sure-to-be-controversial film The Life of Jesus has been postponed, but the more commerc...
Harrison Ford Will See You Now October 15, 2024
Harrison Ford, legendary actor and sufferer of zero fools, star of Indiana Jones and Star Wars and a million glorious ’90s conspiracy thrillers, is now improbably starring in a TV comedy....
You Can Call Me Al October 14, 2024
I am not a fan of audio books. I prefer pages and ink. However, if you have any interest in Al Pacino’s new memoir, Sonny Boy, I urge you to listen to the actor read it himself. The text offers many pleasures, but it is also ragged and discursive, fu...
Dakota Fanning Is Finally Letting Loose October 11, 2024
Dakota Fanning is aware of her reputation as the good girl, the sophisticated professional, the child star with a big grin and a precocious attitude. For many of us millennials, she has grown up right along with us: Her career began in the early augh...
Hannah and Her Resisters October 09, 2024
One of the greatest beneficiaries of Donald Trump’s 2016 election was Hannah Arendt—or at least, her literary estate. In the first year of Trump’s presidency, sales of Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism soared by 1,000 percent. New editions of ...
'Joker 2' Is So Bad It’s Almost Laughable October 08, 2024
In 2019, a year now separated from us by enough catastrophic global events to feel like a remote archaeological era, the movie Joker, like it or not (I certainly didn’t), was a big deal. It won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and later ga...
We Are in Need of Renaissance People October 08, 2024
The songwriter, actor, country/western singer, musician, U.S. Army veteran, helicopter pilot, accomplished rugby player and boxer, Rhodes scholar, Pomona College and University of Oxford degreed, and summa cum laude literature graduate, Kris Kristoff...
Al Pacino Is Still Going Big October 07, 2024
Al Pacino has been one of the world’s greatest, most influential actors for more than 50 years. He’s audacious. He’s outrageous. He’s Al Pacino, and I’m pretty sure you know what that entails....
Coppola’s Solo October 03, 2024
Francis Ford Coppola didn’t have the career he wanted. As a young man, he saw himself as a personal filmmaker in the tradition of Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini, someone who’s make many small films with the same group of people, an ever-expandin...
Finding the True Capote October 01, 2024
The literary output of the author, screenwriter, essayist, occasional actor, and purveyor of often waspishly malicious gossip Truman Capote (1924–84) was prodigious. He produced a collection of five full-length novels, eight novellas—among them 1958’...
The Dark Side of Alain Delon September 18, 2024
“I got into this profession thanks to women,” Alain Delon, who died last month, said in 2018. “They’re the ones who got me into making movies. It was women who wanted me, who made me, who gave me everything.”In 1962, a brief affair with the German si...
The Hardest-Working Man in Show Business September 16, 2024
In his dialogue “The Critic as Artist,” Oscar Wilde wrote, “It is always Judas who writes the biography.” What impressed me about the actor Eric Roberts, whose memoir, Runaway Train, comes out this week, was how willing he was to betray himself....
They Want Government to Be God September 16, 2024
If you had told me back in the 1970s, when I was watching actor Scott Baio on the hit sitcom Happy Days, that 50 years later I would be talking to him about China’s Cultural Revolution, I would have thought you were crazy. Yet here we are. Baio, an o...
On Tom Stoppard’s 'The Real Thing' September 10, 2024
In Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing a playwright leaves the actress he is married to, who is acting in his play as a wife suspected of cheating on her husband, and goes to live with another actress, who is married to the actor who is playing the guy in ...
James Earl Jones, Distinguished Actor, Dies at 93 September 10, 2024
James Earl Jones, the prolific film, TV and theater actor whose resonant, unmistakable baritone was most widely known as the voice of “Star Wars” villain Darth Vader, died Monday morning at his home in Dutchess County, N.Y., his rep confirmed to Vari...
All 53 Live-Action Tom Hanks Movies, Ranked September 02, 2024
Tom Hanks made his big-screen debut in an unremarkable 1980 slasher cheapie called He Knows You’re Alone. And based on that inauspicious start, it’s safe to say that no one could have predicted that he would go on to become a two-time Best Actor Osca...
How Gena Rowlands Redefined the Art of Acting August 21, 2024
Gena Rowlands, who died last Wednesday, at the age of ninety-four, is, of all the actresses I’ve ever seen onscreen, the greatest artist. She’s the one whose performances offer the most surprises, the most shocks, the most moment-to-moment inventiven...
