Word: witherspoon
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Rendition” develops three interconnected storylines. Isabella (Reese Witherspoon) desperately searches for her husband Anwar (Omar Metwally), a Egyptian-born chemical engineer who has been kidnapped by the CIA under questionable pretenses; inexperienced CIA analyst Douglas Freeman (Jake Gyllenhaal) struggles to torture a man he believes is innocent; and, in a seemingly unrelated thread, the daughter of an Egyptian, CIA-sanctioned torturer rebels against her traditionalist father by falling in love with a radical student whose personal life remains a mystery...
...Hollywood finally getting the Iraq bug. Two American fiction films, Brian De Palma's Redacted and Paul Haggis' In the Valley of Elah, both based on true incidents of violence involving U.S. soldiers, have been among the festival's most strident talking points. Gavin Hood's Rendition tossed Reese Witherspoon, Jake Gyllenhaal and Meryl Streep into a story of U.S.-condoned torture of a terror suspect. But documentary films are the main entertainment conduit for leftist antiwar sentiment (the right wing has talk radio), and TIFF 31 has entries from two men with the proper pedigree: Phil Donahue, the liberal...
This week's hot Hollywood couple, Reese Witherspoon and Jake Gyllenhaal, danced briefly but divinely last night at a beyond-posh Toronto Film Festival party co-sponsored by TIME magazine. Across the way in the huge Design Exchange room, once home to the Toronto Stock Exchange, George Clooney stood in a corner, pinned by the admiration of other, less famous swells. If the three eminences had come there to schmooze with a TIME movie critic, they missed their big chance. Even so, they seemed as happy as celebrities ought to be, given their privileged status in our bi-national movie...
...that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke's famous phrase could serve as the text for both Clooney's Michael Clayton and the Witherspoon-Gyllenhaal Rendition. Both are fictionalized expos?s: the first of corporate malfeasance, the second of Bush Administration policy in its war on Muslim extremists. At the center of each is a man trapped in a dilemma between doing what is damn well expected of him and risking his livelihood, and maybe his life, by doing the right thing...
RENDITION As in "extraordinary rendition," the euphemism for the U.S. government's policy to outsource the torturing of terror suspects. Reese Witherspoon is the wife of one such unfortunate: Jake Gyllenhaal, a young CIA officer, with Meryl Streep as his brass-hard boss. It's just the sort of movie Toronto loves: important, politically relevant and studded with star power...