A discourteous comedian takes the place of a king in Chang-min Choo’s elegant, languid Masquerade, a Korean costume drama starring the formidable Byung-hun Lee, sadly best known to American audiences as Storm Shadow, courtesy of the G.I. Joe franchise. Lee, who is a Korean star par excellence, is the film’s focus, portraying both the hardened,…
Nicholas A. Christakis, a physician and social scientist at Harvard Medical School, published a provocative article in 2008 in the British Medical Journal, titled “Dynamic Spread of Happiness in a Large Social Network.” In it he states, “Happiness is more contagious than previously thought . . . Emotions have a collective existence — they are…
Thrust to the screen in choppy black and white footage is the deployment of the A-Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the Enola Gay in 1945. What ensues is mayhem and the emergence of a death-gripping mushroom cloud. Next, there’s a second of deafening silence before the screen is flooded with the blustering sounds of…
In a film within a film, director Sebastian (Gael Garcia Bernal) and producer Costa (Luis Tosar) are shooting in Cochabamba, Bolivia in the year 2000. The film they are working on proposes to depict Christopher Columbus’ exploitation of the indigenous native population in his voyage to the Americas and the effort of two priests to…
A cinematic peek behind the curtain of the raid that ended with Osama Bin Laden’s assassination in May 2011 is certainly an intriguing hook for a movie, but it’s far from the whole story that unfolds in Kathryn Bigelow’s tense, taut thriller Zero Dark Thirty. Achieving intimacy in this gigantic narrative about a decade-long manhunt…
Coming after the failure of singer/songwriter Paul Simon’s solo album Hearts and Bones, and the messy breakup with Art Garfunkel, his 1986 album Graceland was the most successful of his career and, to many, the artistic highlight. Simon’s return to South Africa to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Graceland is documented in Joe Berlinger’s exuberant…
In 2012, Abraham Lincoln is on currency, in hundreds of dusty books, and sitting in a chair in his own memorial at one end of the National Mall. His image is stale; he is not a man, but an unknowable symbol. Steven Spielberg, however, fashions the legend into a flesh and blood human being in…
