I'll skip the diatribe about how the year in movies has been so far. It sucks. Let's look forward. The second half of the year brings everything from film festival favorites and art house Oscar bait to documentaries and big-budget blockbusters.  

Morgan Freeman and Clint Eastwood's 'Invictus' could mistakenly be considered the story of Nelson Mandela's first days as president of South Africa. It's not that story at all. In typical Eastwood fashion, he has produced and directed something more basic and elemental than that because the film is nothing more than a bare recounting of a country and its first inspired steps toward unification. Grade: B plus.  

Clint Eastwood is not a gifted actor. Twenty years ago, that wouldn’t have been a particularly daring critical statement. The odd outlier like Tightrope notwithstanding, he was known primarily as a guy who could squint one-dimensionally while firing a gun or squint one-dimensionally while being punched by an orangutan.  

Clint Eastwood’s latest film, set in the corrupt Los Angeles of the Roaring 1920s, is based on a true story so horrifically weird that it would be a challenge for anyone to figure out how to smoothly, effectively tell it.