Neil Morris

Pink Panther 2 opens Friday. I don’t blame Steve Martin for making The Pink Panther 2. There is not exactly a wealth of plum film roles reserved for 60-something-year-old comedians, no matter their résumé (“paging Chevy Chase …”). And, although reviving the rather outmoded Pink Panther movie series seemed questionable when Martin assumed the role […]

The Wrestler opens Friday in select theaters In The Wrestler, a down-and-out bum grasps for one more shot at glory. But the small but significant difference between Darren Aronofsky’s new film and similarly situated movies such as The Champ, Rocky and Cinderella Man is that boxing commands respect, while professional wrestling remains déclassé. The sport […]

Revolutionary Road opens Friday in select theaters It’s fair to consider whether director Sam Mendes’ 2008 adaptation of Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates’ 1961 assault on 1950s Eisenhower-era conformity, risks looking anachronistic when viewed through time’s rear-view mirror. The conceits of stifling suburbia and middle-class malaise have been explored in film, using milieus both dated (Todd […]

Gran Torino opens Friday throughout the Triangle As an actor, Clint Eastwood is the most distinctly American film icon since John Wayne. As a director, Eastwood’s films succeed (if at all) in spite of a languid, vastly overrated filmmaking style that his devotees continue to blindly deify, the same deference again being afforded Woody Allen […]

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button opens Thursday throughout the Triangle For all its highbrow aspirations, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button remains a gimmick in search of a message. Brad Pitt plays the title character, born near the end of World War I as a prematurely aged infant and abandoned by his father (Jason […]

Doubt opens Thursday throughout the Triangle Amid a surfeit of murky epistemology, the narrative high point in John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt comes during an exchange between Sister Aloysius Beauvier (Meryl Streep), the stern Mother Superior at St. Nicholas Church in the Bronx, and Ms. Muller (Viola Davis), the mother of a 12-year-old who is also […]

Valkyrie opens Thursday throughout the Triangle In Valkyrie, director Bryan Singer assumes that today’s audiences will embrace the virtue of German officers who plotted to kill Adolf Hitler in the “July 20 plot” of 1944. Branded as traitors at the time, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg and his fellow plotters are memorialized today as heroes, in […]

Slumdog Millionaire opens Friday in select theaters In his travel narrative Following the Equator, Mark Twain wrote, “India has two million gods, and worships them all. In religion, all other countries are paupers; India is the only millionaire.” Some may regard the theatrical release of the Mumbai-set Slumdog Millionaire as poorly timed in light of […]