it is a great joy to read movie criticism written by someone who both loves and understands movies.  so-called film critics neither know nor love movies and use their writing primarily as a means of establishing their own ideological bona fides.   the witer has grasped a fundamental ppint about contemporary hollywood, which is that there are no men, simply an endless number of fungible vacuous pretty boys.  eastwood's invictus was a fine movie not least because it offered a demonjstration that matt damon is actually capable of acting.

 Absolutely captivating read. Excellent. More please.

Enjoyed the article; well written, concise, and from my point of view, also accurate.  Good work.

Regarding Peter O'Toole's effeminate appearance in Lawrence of Arabia, he is no more so than Robert Taylor in Broadway Melody of 1938. He had more makeup on than Tammy Faye. And yet Robert went on to play many superlatively masculine types. I am a great admirer of the movies from the thirties, and conversely I will not watch a Sean Penn movie even if it's free. Subjecting my visceral reactions to sober analysis, I come up with two main reasons for preferring movies from those times. First of all comes the writing. The scripts are tight, the lines clever and provocative. Impossible to do now in the present tyranny of PC, which is far worse than the much derided production code. And then, of course, the female stars are breathtakingly beautiful. Lana Turner and Hedy Lamarr spring to mind but there were so many others. They had an understated elegance that I attribute to the fact that though they are young women, they are decidedly women and not girls. They were adults instead of faded strumpets hanging on to their obnoxious adolescence as todays movie stars do.