Our film critic Ann Hornaday is at the Toronto International Film Fest.
Read her dispatch about “Argo,” Ben Affleck’s new movie. (Everyone’s already saying it’s going to win best picture next year; they’re right.)
Starship was meant to fly.
Ann Hornaday: “’Rock of Ages’ flashes its ersatz swagger and antiseptic style as confidently as Cruise wears his character’s jewel-encrusted codpiece.” Read the rest of the review.
"In entertainment, the use of the word may have started as a subversive expression of women’s empowerment, but the jokes are beginning to feel forced, lazy and opportunistic. And this year’s toxically punitive political discourse lays bare just how tenuous — and deeply threatening — that empowerment is. With the vagina now the acceptable rhetorical purview of Texas legislators and Jonah Hill, it seems to have become alarmingly co-opted, either in the name of patriarchy or cheap laughs."
— Post film critic Ann Hornaday on “vagina.”
Ryan Gosling skeeves us out. There, we said it. It’s the simpering, lacrosse-y look in his eyes that says, “I would have made fun of you in high school but no one would believe you if you tattled.”
Also, our film critic didn’t like his political movie, and being in Washington, she knows political movies.
Also, The Notebook didn’t make us cry.
Ann Hornaday ranks the Coen brothers’ movies
1. Fargo
2. Miller’s Crossing
3. Raising Arizona
4. O Brother, Where Art Thou?
5. Barton Fink
6. Blood Simple
7. Burn after Reading
8. True Grit
9. The Hudsucker Proxy
10. Intolerable Cruelty
11. The Big Lebowski
12. A Serious Man
13. The Man Who Wasn’t There
14. No Country for Old Men
15. The Ladykillers
Read why here. What’s Newt Gingrich’s favorite Coen bros movie? Answer here. What’s your ranking?
Ann Hornaday on True Grit: “Filmed in the sere sepia tones befitting the 19th-century West, ‘True Grit’ has the look, feel and sound of that era, its characters speaking in the courtly, declamatory style that can first strike the ear as mannered but soon takes on the cadence of folk poetry.”
Also in Style today: Manuel Roig-Franzia wades into the prideful dissonance of Charleston’s Secession Ball, Libby Copeland on our national nakedness at the hands of the TSA, and Nina Totenberg does NOT hate Christmas.
A gorgeous movie deserves a gorgeous newsprint display.
The design is by Sean McCabe. The review is by Ann Hornaday, who calls Black Swan a “near-masterpiece.”
(Remember: We were the first to alert you to its awesomeness, back in September.)
