Category: Joseph Gordon-Levitt

  • Romance on the Big Screen

    This week we commemorate the 95th anniversary of that fateful day seven members of the George “Bugs” Moran gang were mowed down, deep-dish Chicago style, by four of Al Capone’s Tommy gun-wielding henchmen. Or to put it another way, this Wednesday marks Valentine’s Day. As such, it seems as appropriate a time as any to…

  • The Lookout (2007)

    In trying to recreate a sensibility from a bygone era, modern-day film noirs can seem as stiff and artificial as Botox treatment, but not The Lookout. Veteran screenwriter Scott Frank, making an impressive directorial debut here, adheres to the tenets of the genre without it feeling like a hermetically sealed tribute. The psychologically hobbled hero,…

  • (500) Days of Summer (2009)

    Romantic comedies can be as propagandistic as any jingoistic World War II-era flag-waver, playing in the sandbox of audiences’ lovesick fantasies while paying only lip service to the messy reality of relationships. That’s why you have to admire a picture as cheerfully impish as (500) Days of Summer and the zeal with which it both…