Word: manly
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Single Man, directed by Tom Ford...
...close to three decades, Colin Firth has been a reliable, gently charismatic leading man in the theater (Another Country), in movies (Bridget Jones's Diary) and on TV (as the dreamboat Mr. Darcy in the BBC's 1995 version of Pride and Prejudice). But until now, at 49, he never got that Role of a Lifetime that actors pray for. George, in Tom Ford's adaptation of the Christopher Isherwood novel, is it. The movie brought Firth the Best Actor prize at the Venice Film Festival and was bought for U.S. distribution by the Weinstein Company...
...flash, is his forte. Playing to Firth's subtleties, he photographs the actor's handsome, mourning face in caressing close-up. (In his professor glasses, Firth looks like a young, more studious Michael Caine.) Ford is also attentive to the varieties of Southern California sunlight, which lends A Single Man an orangey warmth that should touch all who see the picture. But it's Firth's performance, as a man bereft, for whom solitude is a life sentence, that will win audience's hearts. Don't be surprised if he earns an Oscar nomination to match his victory in Venice...
...viewer wants both to stay inside - shielding them from harm, or from doing harm - and to get the hell out. The situation may be familiar from dozens of Hollywood foxhole dramas, but the treatment is original: What other movie has, as its exalting emotional climax, the spectacle of one man helping another to pee into a tin can? Working as a horrors-of-war screed and a depiction of men under impossible stress, Lebanon is a salutary, unrelentingly claustrophobic nightmare. Life During Wartime, directed by Todd Solondz...
...zeroing in on possible money flows from Saudi Arabia and Yemen. The increased integration of Indonesian terror into a global network will make it harder for even the most diligent of Indonesian anti-terror task forces to monitor extremist Islamic activity at home - despite the reported demise of a man as influential as Noordin Mohammed...