Kenneth Turan
Kenneth Turan is the film critic for the Los Angeles Times and NPR's Morning Edition, as well as the director of the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes. He has been a staff writer for the Washington Post and TV Guide, and served as the Times' book review editor.
A graduate of Swarthmore College and Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, he is the co-author of Call Me Anna: The Autobiography of Patty Duke. He teaches film reviewing and non-fiction writing at USC and is on the board of directors of the National Yiddish Book Center. His most recent books are the University of California Press' Sundance to Sarajevo: Film Festivals and the World They Made and Never Coming To A Theater Near You, published by Public Affairs Press.
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The film Get Rich or Die Tryin' opens in limited release Wednesday. Critic Kenneth Turan says that while director Jim Sheridan turned out a quality film, it's marred by Sheridan's use of salacious material.
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Anthony Swofford's memoir of his time as a Marine in the first Iraq war, Jarhead, has been adapted to the screen. Critic Kenneth Turan says the movie has brilliant parts and excellent co-stars, but the picture rarely makes the emotional connection it's after.
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Paradise Now is a powerful and provocative drama about the nightmare of terrorism. It gets its strength from its dispassion. It is uncompromising in its determination to explain, rather than justify, incomprehensible acts.
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North Country, starring Charlize Theron, is about the sexual harassment class action lawsuit that the women of EVTAC mines in Minnesota filed in the 1980s. Critic Turan says the taint of melodrama affects the entire movie, despite a good performance by Theron.
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The Squid and the Whale won two awards at the Sundance film festival. It's now in theaters. Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan says the movie deserves both, calling it "acutely observed [and] faultlessly acted."
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Set in 1950's America, Good Night and Good Luck portrays the real-life conflict between television newsman Edward R. Murrow and Sen. Joseph McCarthy.
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Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan reviews Carroll Ballard's movie Duma about a boy and a cheetah. He says the film has the same magical qualities as Ballard's earlier films, Fly Away Home and The Black Stallion.
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Film critic Kenneth Turan reviews director David Cronenberg's latest work, A History of Violence. Cronenberg directed films that many consider bizarre, such as Crash, The Fly and Naked Lunch. Turan says this film is less strange, but more disturbing.
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Film critic Kenneth Turan reviews the movie Proof Gwyneth Paltrow, Anthony Hopkins, Hope Davis, Jake Gyllenhaal star in the film version of this Tony and Pulitzer-winning play about a mad mathematician whose daughter may have written his most celebrated proof.
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Film critic Kenneth Turan reviews Memory of a Killer, a Dutch noir thriller about a hit man who's developed Alzheimer's disease. The film is based on the much-praised crime novel series by Jef Geeraerts.