Anthony Lane reviews the new Darwin biopic Creation in the New Yorker. As is his habit, Lane manages to write some lovely stuff about a movie he doesn’t care much for (”at once slow and overwrought”). I have to agree with him on this, for example:

[Actor Paul] Bettany, with his jungly sideburns and smooth pate, offers a reasonable likeness of the great man, although he lacks the shaggy overhang of brow, extending far beyond the sunken eye sockets, which lent Darwin not only his solemn frown but, it must be said, his semi-simian air. I sometimes wonder if his tracing of our ancestry began not on his travels, or at his desk, but one morning when he glanced into his shaving mirror.

[Image: Wikipedia]