The Ides of March (2011)

Based on the play Farragut North by Beau Willimon, The Ides of March is not the suspenseful thriller imagined by studio marketing executives and portrayed in the trailers. Instead, the film, directed and co-written by George Clooney and starring Clooney, Ryan Gosling, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti, simmers to a boil, allowing its stars to stew in their performances before revealing its final secrets. In The Ides of March, impossibly handsome Gosling plays a starry-eyed press secretary for even more impossibly handsome Clooney's Pennsylvania governor, who is in a neck-and-neck race for the Ohio Democratic presidential primary. This pair of unwitting pretty boys, however, are no match for the political chess game between the master strategists played by Giamatti and Hoffman. Step aside, leading men. In an interesting sleight of hand, director Clooney hands this film over to the character actors. Evan Rachel Wood and Marisa Tomei also star. Read my review.