Fighting over street space is nothing new. Before the Model T made driving an everyman's game, New York police had little tolerance for the automobile crowd, viewing them as arrogant, wealthy scofflaws who treated the city like their private playground. Now we've entered a different era—a neo-Gilded one in which the wealthy scofflaws ride road bikes, and working-class cops are willing to go outside the law to protect the working-class driver's exclusive ownership of the right of way.

Since Portnoy's Complaint Philip Roth has been our national chronicler of horny male vigor. Not because such characters are a constant in his work (they aren't), but because they boast a vividness that verges, just barely, on the cartoonish. And because they are smart—and, amazingly, it helps.

Ben Kingsley, as David Kepesh, plays one of these brainy skirtchasers in Elegy, the new movie based on Roth's 2001 novel The Dying Animal. Kingsley is very good in the role. His skin is tanned the color of peanut brittle, his broad chest is tight as a drum, his shaved head casts a glare. He looks lubed. Read More

The technical issues first. No chiaroscuro, but a pervasive, lumbering shroud of murk: action scenes seem to take place behind screen doors; the camera is only inches away from the actors' faces. Gotham, land of spires and leering gargoyles, is downgraded to glassy downtown Chicago, the Second City looking as poor in the half-light as if it were the Twenty-Seventh. Heath Ledger is good, sure, perhaps the only actor taking any joy in the proceedings: but is he any better than Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow? He spends far too much time in the movie explaining himself and his cheerful anarchism, even though his point is that explanations are superfluous. "I don't have plans," he tells us, and neither do the filmmakers. The logic of the action is a joke without a punch-line: cars, trucks, motorcycles slam together and hundreds of gas barrels explode, all inconsequentially: the body count is a staggering thirty-six, but had a pile more been thrown onto the fire, the effect would have felt equally numbing, like stacks of $185 million dollars being thrown at your head. Was the film edited? It's hard to tell. The Scarecrow, villain of Batman Begins, appears early in the film to attempt a minor crime only to disappear in remainder, forgotten. Gotham's mayor holds up a cigar cutter for an extended interview scene, but never cuts a cigar. Read More