• With “The Pale Blue Eye” director Scott Cooper has found his mojo again.

    Ever since his excellent 2009 directorial debut “Crazy Heart” and his 2013 sophomore effort “Out of the Furnace,” Cooper had struggled to find a strength in his follow up projects.

    2015’s true story of Whitey Bolger “Black Mass” was underwhelming.

  • In "American Hustle"’s would-be signature moment con-man Christian Bale shows G-man Bradley Cooper a Rembrandt in a gallery. He explains that it’s really a fake. Who is the better artist, he asks, the original artist or the person who took the time and skill to fake it?

    Well, I would say the artist. He is the one who perceived it. He is the one who conceived it. He is the one who summoned the inspiration.

  • Can Christian Bale do a good Moses? Charlton Heston was […]

  • Scared or turned on? A Reddit reader put together a composite picture of all the actors having interpreted the M.I.6 agent in an attempt at revealing the real face of James Bond. Sean Connery and Pierce Brosnan are very recognizable, whereas Timothy Dalton and Roger Moore tend to get lost in the alpha-Brit melee. If nothing else, this fun project may help give some ideas to the producers of the

  • If “Inception“ found Christopher Nolan debating whether to surrender, Tarkovsky-like, the real world for the deepest levels of imagination, “The Dark Knight” Rises finds him already having taken the plunge. Where would you rather be as a musclebound cross between Darth Vader and Lord Humongous, Warrior of the Wasteland sinks Gotham into a nuclear-tipped French Revolution? When peasant kangaroo courts manned by maniacs

  • For the mainstream audiences that equate Bale with the stoic anti-hero of Christopher Nolan’s “Batman” movies, Bale’s smoking-fuse performance in “The Fighter” could open eyes. This is the first film with popular aspirations in which Bale completely submerges into an edgy character. He lost weight to create a gaunt and wasting appearance, and I’m not sure how any normal human being could voluntarily make his eyes bulge like that. One wonders if he took a pair of pliers and plucked out his own real teeth just to heighten the authenticity.

  • There is never a doubt about how the fights will turn out in “The Fighter,” except the ones that play out within the family of Mickey Ward. Dickey Eklund (Christian Bale) at one time was called "Pride of Lowell, Massachusetts” because he managed to knock down Sugar-Ray Leonard (though some would say Sugar-Ray tripped).