Aaron Eckhart is the glib, proudly obfuscating tobacco lobbyist in Jason Reitman’s wickedly witty adaptation of Christopher Buckley’s novel. He’s also our hero.
Tag: 2006
Daniel Craig reinvents James Bond in ‘Casino Royale’ on Amazon Prime
Daniel Craig became the sixth actor to play James Bond in the official series in this tough, lean, faithful adaptation of Ian Fleming’s first novel. It revived the flagging franchise.
‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ – Guillermo del Toro’s dark fairy tale on Netflix
This elemental ‘Alice in Wonderland’ is both an escape from and a fantastical reflection of the horrors of Francisco Franco’s reign of terror in 1944 Spain.
‘Friday Night Lights: Complete Series’ on Netflix, Hulu, and Peacock
The acclaimed drama set in a high school in a small Texas town is not so much a sports drama as a drama about people whose lives were—for better and for worse—defined by sports.
Tommy Lee Jones in ‘The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada’ on Amazon Prime
The directorial of Tommy Lee Jones is an odyssey of a contemporary western both rough and poetic, laconic and passionate.
‘Margaret’ – a powerful American drama on Criterion Channel
Anna Paquin stars in Kenneth Lonergan’s powerful, provocative, ambitious drama set in the shadow of September 11, 2001, a marvelously messy film about the messiness of emotions and people and relationships.
‘Exiled’ – Johnnie To’s gangster odyssey on Amazon Prime
A simple hot becomes a buddy crime odyssey in Johnnie To’s elegant genre exercise reuniting the stars of his gangster classic ‘The Mission.’
Martin Scorsese’s ‘The Departed’ on HBO Max
Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, and Jack Nicholson star in Scorsese’s 2006 return to American urban crime cinema, which became the biggest hit of his career and earned him his first Academy Award for Best Director.
Last chance: ‘Stranger than Fiction’ – Will Ferrell takes on his author on Netflix
This offbeat, warm-hearted comedy puts a fantastical twist on a time-worn premise, with Ferrell as a man who discovers he’s actually a character in a novel who is doomed to die.
‘Marie Antoinette’ – decadent young royals on Amazon Prime
Kirsten Dunst is Marie Antoinette (2006) in Sofia Coppola’s portrait of the decadent, indifferent monarchy that toppled in the French Revolution. Marie is a teenage Austrian princess married off to France’s distant young King Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman) and sent to the alien of the French court. She’s a political naïf dropped into a world […]