Arts & Culture

Robert Longfellow, the auspiciously named playwright at the center of Collaborator, was at one point good enough to be sincerely called "the voice of his generation." What a convenient shortcut for a film about a writer! The moniker says everything — he's basically Arthur Miller, see? — without his needing to say anything. It doesn't matter what the man wrote, only that people thought it was grand.

Kev, the man at the center of Last Ride, has a very particular skill set: He can lift wallets, steal cars and survive in the Australian bush, sleeping under the stars and dining on fresh wild rabbit. Taking care of his 10-year-old son, however, comes less naturally to him.

Both factions in Oliver Stone's new movie refer to each other, not without reason, as "savages." But this drug-war thriller is not nearly so feral as such previous Stone rampages as U-Turn and Natural Born Killers. Occasionally, it even seems righteous.

What would the Olympics look like if they were carried out not by the best exemplars of athletic prowess that the world has to offer, but rather by pudgy 30-somethings playing skee-ball and having underwater breath-holding contests? Pretty pathetic, of course — but combine the self-serious grandeur of Olympics coverage with those half-ass athletes, and you've got the comic foundation for Jay and Mark Duplass' The Do-Deca-Pentathlon.