A legal “fixer” who works behind the scenes of a powerful New York law firm stumbles into a corporate conspiracy in Tony Gilroy’s smart, sharp legal drama.
Tag: Tom Wilkinson
The Complete ‘Prime Suspect’ with Helen Mirren on Hulu and BritBox
Helen Mirren got the role of a lifetime playing DCI Jane Tennison, a tough, tenacious, at times brittle woman in a brutally chauvinist British police culture in a series of smart mysteries.
‘Batman Begins’ – Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight on Hulu
One of the defining films in the elevation of comic book movies to adult fare, Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins (2005) rebooted the Batman mythos for the big screen, bringing the often lighthearted hero back to the shadows, both figuratively and literally. It’s quite a leap from the previous Batman revival launched by Tim Burton’s 1989 […]
Last chance: Roman Polanski’s ‘The Ghost Writer’ on Hulu
Ewan McGregor is The Ghost Writer (2010), a scribe-for-hire in the celebrity autobiography business who is contracted to rewrite the dry memoirs of a former British Prime Minister (Pierce Brosnan), in the smart, gripping, subtly Hitchcockian thriller from director Roman Polanski and author Robert Harris. The writer has no other name in the film—he introduces […]
‘In the Bedroom’ on Paramount+
In the Bedroom (2001), a hushed portrait of love, loss, and vengeance in a sleepy New England backwater, is a harrowing drama starring Sissy Spacek and Tom Wilkinson as parents who stop communicating after the violent death of their only son. The directing debut of actor Todd Field (he played the pianist in Stanley Kubrick’s […]
‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’ on Peacock
Charlie Kaufman, the screenwriter of Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, offers his most poignant and touching work in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). You wouldn’t even know it was his work from the opening of the film, an awkwardly sweet romantic flirtation between shy sad sack Joel (Jim Carrey in his least mannered […]
Academy Award winner ‘Selma’ free on digital platforms
Selma (2014), directed by Ava Duvernay (who also rewrote the screenplay without credit, due to conditions of original screenwriter Paul Webb’s deal), takes on the 1965 march led by Dr. Martin Luther King through Alabama as a benchmark moment in the fight for voting rights and, more generally, civil rights for black citizens in the American […]
‘John Adams’ and the birth of American democracy on Amazon Prime Video and HBO Now
One of the small moments of powerful insight offered in John Adams (2008), the superb HBO miniseries adapted from the biography by David McCullough and dramatized with a vivid sense of immediacy and historical texture, is the reminder that it wasn’t the election of George Washington that defined our democracy. It was the non-violent succession […]