The Informant! Is 'Devilish Fun'

Marion Cotillard, Kate Winslet star in Steven Soderbergh film

(NEWSER) - Critics applaud Steven Soderbergh’s latest effort, Contagion, a deeply disturbing imagining of a global pandemic that features an all-star cast (Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Marion Cotillard, Kate Winslet, Jude Law, Laurence Fishburne):

• It’s “easily the scariest of the disaster films” since 9/11, writes Lou Lumenick in the New York Post . What’s more, it “takes great pains to present its situations realistically, and includes a lot of intelligent speculation about what sort of political, economic, and ethical questions would be raised by such a disaster.”

Steven Soderbergh will direct movie for HBO

(NEWSER) - Michael Douglas will play Liberace in an upcoming biopic for HBO, reports USA Today . Matt Damon will play his young lover, Scott Thorson, and the film will track their relationship during an era when it would have been career suicide for the entertainer to come out as gay, notes the Los Angeles Times . Steven Soderbergh will begin directing Behind the Candelabra next summer. More»

Matt Damon, Emily Blunt star in sci-fi romance

(NEWSER) - The Adjustment Bureau, a sci-fi romance starring Matt Damon and Emily Blunt, tells the story of a political hotshot who meets a woman in the men's room—something that was not part of his destiny. Two "adjusters" explain he must not see her again—leaving the two, in love, racing to outrun or outwit them. Critics are largely positive:

• In the New York Times , Manohla Dargis calls the movie “a fast, sure film about finding and keeping love across time and space.” First-time director George Nolfi “has brightened the season with a witty mix of science-fiction metaphysics and old-fashioned fluttery romance.”

Remake features a star turn by 13-year-old Hailee Steinfeld

(NEWSER) - True Grit, the Coen brothers’ latest, updates a John Wayne classic—though it may stick closer to the original novel than the first film. Critics are impressed, with the Rotten Tomatoes score currently at 95%:

• In the New York Times , Manohla Dargis applauds the film’s 13-year-old star, Hailee Steinfeld, who gives a “memorably ferocious performance” as a “character whose single-minded pursuit of vengeance has unmistakable resonance.”

One person's 'enthralling' is another person's boring

(NEWSER) - Clint Eastwood, Matt Damon … what’s not to like about Hereafter? But not all the critics are overly impressed with this spiritual film that touches on the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and the 2005 London subway bombings:

• “The mostly mesmerizing but finally flawed film” mostly “plays like a smart and stylish thriller,” writes Michael O'Sullivan in the Washington Post . But the promise of three separate and “artfully-woven” plotlines coming together for “a collision—or at least a fusion,” is never realized. “The big payoff fizzles.”
• Mick LaSalle begs to differ: This is one of Eastwood’s best, he writes in the San Francisco Chronicle . “Every shot communicates something precise, whether it's plot detail or a thought or emotion.” The result is a “sympathetic and all-encompassing understanding of the pain and grandeur of life on earth.”