Twilight Saga Mania

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If it hadn’t been released in 1998 with a veteran cast of Hollywood’s finest, you could swear that Twilight was a movie from the 1940s–the kind of intelligent mystery that would’ve made Humphrey Bogart feel right at home. To be sure, that was exactly the intention of director and co-writer Robert Benton (in collaboration with Nobody’s Fool writer Richard Russo), but the film’s blessing is also its curse. Benton and Russo are so enamored of vintage mystery plots and characters that their movie nearly succumbs to the burden of old-fashioned familiarity. As the title suggests, the movie’s aging characters, led by Newman as a private eye who’s almost literally on his last legs, are all on the downhill (more…)