Smooth, smug, half-smart. That description doesn't just fit Michael Douglas in the title role, but the movie as a whole, a retro romantic comedy that engineers a meet-cute (and a continuing date-cute) between the Democratic widower in the Oval Office and a married-to-career hatchet woman for an environmental lobby. ("I …

Another week, another round of celebrity pantomimes, this time a biopic prime for Amazon, not theatres. Lucy (Nicole Kidman) loved logic, a trait that clearly did not find a home in writer-director Aaron Sorkin’s final cut. The pampered superstar couldn’t find a washing machine in a Maytag showroom. What would …

Didactic poli-sci lesson on How the System Works, entertainingly illustrated by screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and director Mike Nichols. The titular war is the one between the Soviets and the Afghans in the Reagan era, and Charlie Wilson is a nonfictional Texas congressman (played with supreme complacency by Tom Hanks) who, …

Word-pusher Aaron Sorkin makes his debut as a director, and whaddya know, he directs a lot like he writes: fast and smooth, bordering on slick. But just bordering, because love demands at least a soupçon of sincerity, and he’s found someone to love in Molly Bloom (Jessica Chastain). She’s a …

Everything you never wanted to know about the advent of Facebook, where “friends” gather on the Internet. An amorphous series of flashbacks from the depositions of two separate lawsuits takes you through the steps by which a socially inept (how ironic!) Harvard computer nerd stumbled upon “a once-in-a-generation holy-shit idea” …

Having treated the man who put life online — Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg — screenwriter Aaron Sorkin now turns his attention to the man who put it into the machine. (Not for nothing is the Apple co-founder so desperate to have the Mac say "Hello" at its unveiling.) Once again, …