Ralph Fiennes

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Review: Coriolanus

Filming the Bard
In a line of fascist-style stagings of the Bard from Orson Welles's 1937 black-shirted Julius Caesar to Richard Loncraine's brown-shirted Richard III (1998), Ralph Fiennes sets his lean and hungry take on Shakespeare's tragedy in a mo dern-day war zone, paring the play to a brisk two hours.
By PETER KEOUGH | February 16, 2012

Review: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part One

Bleak magic: Deathly Hallows lives up to its name
When a movie begins with the Warner Bros. logo crumbling in decay and ends with a defiled grave, you know you've experienced an evening of magic.
By PETER KEOUGH | February 24, 2011

Review: Clash of the Titans

Divine badness reigns
It takes a lot of movie magic to reduce some 3000 years of mythology to piffle. After watching this farrago produced by state-of-the-art 3-D and CGI, I’m all for the return of the oral tradition.
By PETER KEOUGH | April 02, 2010

Silly season

Spring pimps for summer
Now that the Oscars are over, let's get dumb.
By PETER KEOUGH | March 09, 2010

Oscar predictions 2010: Locker is a lock

Bigelow, Bullock, and Bridges also will win gold
Except for some pipe-dream scenarios in which the 10-nominee/weighted-voting system could turn out a victory for Inglourious Basterds or some other dark horse, everyone concedes that this year's winner for Best Picture and just about every other significant award is — The Hurt Locker ! How did this happen?
By PETER KEOUGH | March 08, 2010

Lite at the end of the tunnel?

Fun and games in post-apocalyptic Hollywood
If you had enough of the end of the world with 2012 , you might be relieved when it comes to 2010.
By PETER KEOUGH | January 04, 2010

Review: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Half-Blood isn't half bad
For teenagers, everything seems like the end of the world: popularity, school, love, family, treacherous conspiracies, the war between good and evil wizards.
By PETER KEOUGH | July 17, 2009

Review: The Hurt Locker

Kathryn Bigelow makes her masterpiece
Now that the troops are pulling out and the war no longer haunts the headlines, maybe people will want to see a film about Iraq — especially since it's one of the best war movies ever made.
By PETER KEOUGH | July 10, 2009

Review: The Reader

Tiresome and callow
It's Christmas, and our thoughts turn toward the Third Reich.
By PETER KEOUGH | January 09, 2009

Of myth and men

The ART’s Communist Dracula Pageant ; the Publick’s Faith Healer
There is more pageantry than either Stalinism or Stoker in The Communist Dracula Pageant , Anne Washburn’s ambitious jumble of a Romanian-history play now in its world premiere from the American Repertory Theatre.
By CAROLYN CLAY | October 28, 2008

The Duchess

A sea of vapidity
There’s nothing like a movie about 18th-century England to make 21st-century Americans feel all smug and morally superior.
By JEFFREY GANTZ | September 23, 2008

Autumn peeves

Films with a full agenda
With pundits already reading political significance into summer blockbusters like The Dark Knight (“Is Batman a stand-in for George Bush? Discuss.”), the meatier movies of fall arrive not a moment too soon.
By PETER KEOUGH | September 11, 2008

Mediæval morality play

In Bruges is a good place to be
It’s location, location, location for Martin McDonagh.
By CAROLYN CLAY | December 16, 2008

The landmark Herodotus: The Histories edited by Robert B. Strassler, translated by Andrea L. Purvis

Pantheon | 1024 pages | $45
What do the late Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski and the fictional archeologist Count László de Almásy (played by Ralph Fiennes in the cinematic adaptation of The English Patient ) have in common?
By PETER KADZIS | December 03, 2007