Movie Review: Bridge of Spies (2015)

by Tony Dayoub


Director Steven Spielberg reunites with Tom Hanks for the cold war thriller Bridge of Spies. Based on fact, the film details the capture and arrest of Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance), an otherwise unremarkable man who was passing on information to our enemies in the most nondescript way, as he painted landscapes in Brooklyn's Prospect Park. James Donovan (Tom Hanks) is a formerly prominent attorney asked to take Abel on as his client in order to give the impression that Abel is getting the best defense there is. When Donovan begins to take his assignment more seriously than anticipated, saving his client from a death sentence, the CIA enlists him to negotiate the release of a downed U2 pilot standing trial in the Soviet Union. The kind of double-play Donovan then chases is a gambit that surprises everyone.

Movie Review: Wanderlust (2012)

by Tony Dayoub

When recent coverage of the Judd Apatow/David Wain comedy Wanderlust turned to the age-old subject of whether Jennifer Aniston had gone topless in the movie, I was sure the comedy was a dud. After all, last time that subject came up, it turned out to be a last ditch publicity stunt to drum up a larger audience for Aniston's truly witless Horrible Bosses. This kind of fruitless bait-and-switch tactic (she keeps her shirt on in both films) is usually good for only a short-term bump; disappointed pervs start slamming a movie that much harder after failing to score a look at the actress's boobs. And for the more discerning of us, reliance on such promotions are a tip-off that a bad movie is desperate for attention, any kind of attention. Before Wanderlust started, one woman sitting behind me commented to her prudish friend, "I hope you're prepared for this. I hear it's got lots of nudity," a distracting disclaimer that's never encouraging. Happily, I can report that, though she was right, the ample nudity in Wanderlust is rightly played for laughs, and any temptation to shock audiences into submitting to the movie's charms by way of Aniston's breasts are largely ignored.