Syriana
— A movie for our times: a challenging look at the many side-effects of crude foreign policy.”
- Director: Stephen Gaghan
- United States, 2005
Syriana is a literate and highly engaging story of cause and effect in the global oil industry. It has a self-propelling pace similar to the one that moved Michael Mann’s The Insider.
Clooney here is magnetic in his downbeat role as the ex-CIA agent Bob Barnes, whose life has been spent in the perpetual twilight of serving his country’s interests in the Middle East and now struggles with changes he can no longer control. Barnes’ story is one of several, the others being connected directly to the oil business, but each influencing the others.
Syriana is a portentous statement that’s already strikingly relevant given the Western foreign policy of our current era, but the film’s wider message should spread well beyond that.
See also:
The Good Shepherd
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- Originally published: 16 Oct 2007 in Film
Atonement
This adaptation of the novel is both period piece and manipulative melodrama.
- Originally published: 4 Feb 2008 in Film
Fargo
A masterpiece of underplay and a black comedy à l’époque, Fargo is a Coen watershed.
- Originally published: 25 Feb 2007 in Film
Walk the Line
Demons and diamonds in this biopic of the late Johnny Cash.
- Originally published: 21 Nov 2006 in Film
Howards End
Some great individual performances. A boon for Forster fans but a bit of a chore for everyone else.
- Originally published: 2 Apr 2007 in Film
Who you gonna call?
Hello you, I'm Mike Padgett. I'm not a Princeton curator, Knoxville mayoral candidate, Kentuckian pastor or Arizona journalist, I just share the same name. In fact, I am a consultant working in user experience and information design.
I also enjoy travel, concerts, films and walking.
I'm originally from Yorkshire, England but nowadays I live in Belgium. My current favourite Belgian beer is Black Albert.
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I collected information from thousands of sources, then I modelled and published it via a lightweight user interface.
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