Christmas-release reviews in NRO

For those who plan to spend Christmas at the movies, I've got a little advice for you: Maybe you shouldn't? Yes, I'm in NRO today with reviews of two Christmastime releases: the post-apocalyptic sci-fi thinkpiece, Children of Men, and Robert De Niro's elegant but overlong CIA history, The Good Shepherd. Neither quite lives up to its potential.

Here's a glimpse of the future:

Children of Men ... which takes place in a near-future Britain struggling to maintain some semblance of order after the human race has inexplicably lost its ability to bear children, shares some fears with its apocalyptic counterparts. But whereas its predecessors tended to be premised on a sudden, grand failure of infrastructure, usually due to some human folly, director Alfonso Cuarón's movie posits a slow, painful decline caused by a mysterious loss of biological will. Instead of looking far into the future after civilization's collapse, it presents a near-future in which humanity lies on its death bed — an end-times vision of demography-as-destiny, in which demography has failed and the only destiny is the grave. It's a subtler take on humanity's destruction, but unfortunately, not subtle enough.

And The Good Shepherd:

The modern spy-story paradigm tends to prize excitement over believability, tension over coherence, and tangled plotting over depth of character. The Good Shepherd, director Robert De Niro's richly produced CIA epic, reverses these predilections, opting to elevate character and seriousness over action-film frivolity. For a little while, this is promising, and the elegant production sustains an air of thoughtful luxury throughout. But eventually, it becomes clear that this is a spy movie so concerned with its own weighty-yet-vague ambitions that it's traded edge-of-your-seat for put-you-to-sleep.