The entertainment

Best of Enemies

Crit

Lunatic fringe bloodsport: this documentary shows how TV news changed when ABC, then the distant third of the then-three major networks ("It would have been fourth, but there were only three," one interviewee remarks), ceded gavel-to-gavel coverage of the 1968 presidential conventions to NBC and CBS, throwing a wrinkle into the affair by inviting the rabidly liberal Gore Vidal and the convulsively conservative William F. Buckley Jr. to "debate" during the conventions. Well, the 10 sessions were called debates; they were really character-assassination tennis matches, riveting and appalling, and harbingers of the partisanship in the future for television news. A train-wreck fascinating film.

The End of the Tour

Crit

It's no exaggeration to say that, via Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace changed my life, and not just my reading life. His suicide was one of the saddest of a whole bunch of sad deaths in recent years, and his memory is pretty nigh sacred to me. And much as I like Jason Segel as a comic actor, casting him as Wallace seemed odd at best, catastrophic at worst.

In the event, Segel performs brilliantly opposite Jesse Eisenberg as a Rolling Stone writer in what plays out essentially as a tragic love story. Terrific film, even if they did use Michigan as a stand-in for my native Illinois plains.

Trailers

• Room--I let out an audible gasp when I recognized this adaptation of one of the most disturbing and moving novels I've read in recent year. I think I'm rooting for reviews good enough to make me see it, though part of me would be relieved not to have to go there again.
• Steve Jobs--Michael Fassbender fronts an excellent cast as the monomaniacal visionary.
• Suffragette--Streep plays Mrs. Pankhurst, but the film seems to be about the rank and file, with Carey Mulligan in the lead role.
• Mistress America--Another Baumbach-Gerwig project; I'm in.
• 99 Homes--Evictee sells soul to evictor to keep a roof over his family's head.