This may be a bit controversial, but I don’t think Daniel Craig makes an excellent Bond.

Granted, my knowledge of Bond is limited to the films (I  haven’t read the books), but to me, Bond is supposed to be cool, elegant, sexy, mischievous, a touch hedonistic, with a sense of mirth and mischief behind his eyes.

Well, one out of six ain’t bad: Craig is cool. (Okay I suppose he’s sexy too, but he’s hardly a seducer. ) He doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who would luxuriate in a good martini, a beautiful woman, an elegant cut of a suit. (Although he does look good in a tux—and, uh, even better out of one.) If there’s anything hiding behind his eyes, it’s darkness, not mischief. Craig’s fairly good with a dry joke, which is one of his better, Bond-like qualities. But he doesn’t seem to possess a delicious secret, as all Bonds should. Indeed, inconceivable as this may be, he doesn’t seem to love being Bond, which is pretty essential to the Bond character.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Craig as an actor—I find his dark, hooded face endlessly fascinating. And I’ve enjoyed his work over the years, particularly in Layer Cake and Munich. But he’s third on my personal list of Bonds,...

Don’t look now, but Ben Affleck has become a major American filmmaker.

He’s actually three-for-three in his directorial efforts—Gone Baby Gone, The Town, and now Argo—with each film getting more ambitious, more accomplished, and just plain better.

And Argo is the work of confident filmmaker who knows he’s at the top of his game.

It’s 1979 and the U.S. Embassy in Iran (that’s Iran with an “n” for you younger readers) has been invaded by an angry mob. The scene is set up swiftly and expertly. We feel the burgeoning panic inside the embassy as the mob gets closer. Then at some point, the dim, hopeless realization sets in: The mob is going to penetrate the gates and nobody is coming to save them.

That was the day, of course, that the Iran hostage crisis began. Most of us know that story well: 52 Americans were taken prisoner. But few of us know about the other, so surreal-it-has-to-be-true story of the six diplomats who escaped to the home of the Canadian ambassador (Victor Garber) and the unlikely mission to save them. (The film’s clever tagline is “based on a declassified true story.”)

Affleck plays Tony Mendez, a CIA “exfiltration” expert—now...

I’m actually jealous of sensitive 16 year olds who get to see The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Of course, growing up, I had John Hughes movies, which were amazing and also elevated my fellow gym class rejects to hero status. But those films were a bit broad and comedic. The Perks of Being a Wallflower is like a super emo version of a John Hughes film, with characters slightly more rooted in a recognizable reality. (The time frame is right, though: The film is set in 1991).

Directed by Stephen Chbosky, who wrote the novel of the same name, Perks tells the story of Charlie (Logan Lerman), a freshman in high school who recently had some unspecified mental health issues (those are fleshed out a bit, later in the film). He feels he’s doomed to a life on the outskirts of school life—forever an observer, never a participant—until he meets the cheerful, irreverent Patrick (Ezra Miller), a senior who’s surprisingly comfortable in his own skin, considering that he’s both gay and dating a closeted football star. Patrick introduces Charlie to his friends, all smart, a little weird, and into what we now called “indie” but used to call “New Wave” music like The Smiths and Dexy’s Midnight...

If you have any chance of enjoying Trouble With the Curve at all, you should first understand that it’s not a real movie.

I mean, yeah, okay, it’s a real movie: It’s playing in actual movie theaters and stars actual movie stars and has something approximating an actual movie script.

But what I mean is, it doesn’t have anything real to say. It doesn’t come from any emotionally authentic place. The pleasures it does have are strictly of the formulaic variety.

I began to suspect that this was the case when I saw Clint Eastwood’s car. Clint is playing Gus, an aging baseball scout, but the car he drives is a vintage Mustang—a movie cliché car, not the kind of a car a guy who has to drive around the country watching prospects would ever own.

And then—THEN—the young aspiring scout played by Justin Timberlake has a similar vintage convertible. They’re not even trying here.

This extends to all the film’s characters.

As Gus, Clint is playing the new Clint, that is to say, an angry old man who growls and sneers and rages against the world, in denial that he has glaucoma, too proud to ask for help.

Amy Adams is his workaholic lawyer daughter, who secretly loves...