All the King's Men (2006)Movies

From my upcoming review in The American Conservative:

At the 2005 Oscars, host Chris Rock asked,

“Who is Jude Law? Why is he in every movie I have seen the last four years? Even the movies he’s not acting in, if you look at the credits, he made cupcakes or something. He’s gay, he’s straight, he’s American, he’s British. Next year he’s playing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.”

In response, an even more than usually pompous Sean Penn defended Law on TV as “one of our finest actors.” This ensured a slagging by film critics of the new version of “All the King’s Men,” in which Penn plays the Huey Long-inspired populist demagogue Willie Stark and Law his enervated aristocrat press secretary Jack Burden,...