Jackie Robinson and Hollywood make history again We are fortunate to have been spared Spike Lee’s take on the Jackie Robinson story, which surely would have been spiteful; emphatic about race grievance and loaded with other Spikey tangents. But Brian Helgeland has made a superb tale about Robinson’s groundbreaking desegregation of baseball through the machinations 
Misery finds plenty of company in ‘The Silence’ The trouble with tragedy is that it is harder than one might think for it to elicit emotion from a third party. Sometimes, an audience remains at a distance despite the harrowing event befalling the characters in front of their eyes. And so it goes with The 
Agent 007 James Bond (Daniel Craig) returns to his roots in Skyfall, defending the MI6 agency to which he’s always had steadfast dedication, even while gallantly enjoying its bachelor benefits. On home turf, Bond restores all of us to our pop culture roots; Skyfall’s national security plot, combining an arch villain’s (Javier Bardem) threats to 
Movie theme songs work as souvenirs; they bring the movie back to your heart—through your ears. No movie series has given the world more aural mementos than the James Bond films. Like the lusted-over, fantasized Bond girls, the Bond themes are not just love objects; the songs are timeless, idealized encapsulations of the excitements of 
THE TRICK AND TREAT OF HOLLYWOOD HALLOWEEN Tim Burton reaches the outer limits of creepy in Frankenweenie, the 3D remake of his 1984 animated short about a boy who plays Frankenstein and brings his dead dog Sparky back to life. That’s why it was a relief to step from that gothic cliché to the more 
By Paul Bisceglio It wasn’t the line New York deserved, but the one it had to wait in last night to see Batman. Movie nerds, comic book nerds and their reluctant significant others alike lined 13th Street at Union Square’s Regal Stadium 14 yesterday for the opening of The Dark Knight Rises, the highly anticipated 
The Delusion of Marvel’s The Avengers Previous Marvel Comics superhero movies such as Iron Man, Hulk, Captain America and Thor were like roughly cut puzzle pieces that looked odd and unfinished by themselves—pretend movies derived from already established brands. Most of them, particularly Jon Favreau’s dung-colored Iron Man, were poorly directed. Now, fitted together in 
