Matt Damon on Fire

The New Yorker’s David Denby likes The Informant and its star:

This time, Soderbergh is in full control, and his star is on fire. Usually chary of words, Damon here is as voluble as a travelling salesman at a hotel bar, and he holds nothing back, never distancing himself from Whitacre’s eager, schmucky side, which, given Damon’s natural charm, is almost endearing, at first. The screenwriter, Scott Z. Burns, trying to shed light on Whitacre’s inner life, creates antic voice-over monologues for him. In the midst of an ordinary task, Whitacre will suddenly, and without cause, take off into bizarrely detailed ruminations—most strangely, one about the inappropriateness of Japanese men in suits buying used girls’ panties on the street. Highly inappropriate, he insists. He seems like a moral fellow with vagrant thoughts and judgments—a little crazy, perhaps, but, then, who doesn’t have intricate flights of fancy or indignation while standing at a checkout line or walking across a parking lot? We get the sense of an indiscriminate intellectual curiosity that can’t be contained by the routines of the workday.

He also writes up Bright Star only not as passionately:

The movie is not the kind of portentous bio-pic in which history, like some sort of hooded eagle, perches on the shoulders of every scene, waiting to soar. Campion, who wrote the script as well as directed, keeps the action day-by-day, small-scale, and casually lyrical. The tale of the love affair (chaste, in this version) is told from Fanny’s point of view.