The American
By Armond White
For one brief moment, The American becomes a true thriller when George Clooney, playing an enigmatic assassin, stakes out a new assignment in Italy and encounters Filippo Timi (who played the mesmerizing figment of Benito Mussolini in Marco Bellocchio’s Vincere). Here, Timi—the actor of the year—projects another fully imagined life: a wary yet generous village mechanic so emotionally open that his complex humanity exposes Clooney’s dull sham. Read more
Clooney clocks in with another lightweight snarky flick with Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air
Like the great Italian Neorealist actors Marcello Mastroianni, Alberto Sordi, Vittorio Gassman and Gian Maria Volontè, Robert De Niro also has the gift for playing working-class men. In Everybody’s Fine, an American remake of a Giuseppe Tornatore tearjerker, De Niro is aged, wearing bifocals, with beautifully swept gray strands in his hair. Read more
The Men Who Stare at Goats
George Clooney meet Dusan Makavejev: Hollywood clown to Yugoslavian art-movie satirist. Clooney’s dismal new comedy The Men Who Stare at Goats makes it essential to re-learn what good political satire means. There’s no richer example than Makavejev’s films, and three of them are now packaged in Criterion’s DVD box set, Dusan Makavejev: Free Radical. Read more
