Posts by David Annandale

Hayden Christensen is the very incarnation of smarm as Stephen Glass, hot-shot writer for The New Republic. His stories are all fabulous, seemingly too good to be true. Which is, in fact, the problem. His tissue of lies begins to unravel when Steve Zahn, reporter for Forbes Digital, tries to follow up one of Christensen’s articles, and can’t find a single legitimate fact. Peter Sarsgaard is Chuck Lane, Christensen’s editor, and he begins to smell a very big rat.

Utterly absorbing stuff. The fall from grace has the structure of a tragedy, but Christensen’s Glass is such a skin-crawling phony that his destruction carries the deep satisfaction of black comedy. Christensen’s oil is perfectly foiled by Sarsgaard, who has the dead-eyed, exhausted integrity of the honest man who has already seen it all far too many times. This is a film is small details and quiet conversations, and it flies by with the pace of an action thriller.