The Invisible Counterpoint

Concerning allegations against Bill Cosby, Prachi Gupta said this:  Two weeks after Dylan Farrow resurrected 21-year-old allegations of sexual abuse at the hands of her father, filmmaker Woody Allen,  Gawker’s Tom Scocca  reminded the world that in 2004, 13 women came forward with allegations that comedian Bill Cosby drugged and sexually abused them. At the time, the lawsuit made a minor ripple in the media, but, like Farrow’s, their accounts were eventually dismissed as barely a blemish on the spotless image of a beloved celebrity.  Now, their stories are reemerging. Last week, Newsweek interviewed  Tamara Green , one of the women who served as a witness in the case brought forth by Andrea Constand. On Wednesday, 46-year-old Barbara Bowman  spoke out in Newsweek .  Both Bowman and Green joined Constand’s lawsuit as witnesses in 2004 after hearing about her case on TV. Newsweek reporter Katie Baker explains that “neither had anything to gain fin...

After you've played God — twice, as Freeman has done in Tom Shadyac's "Bruce Almighty" and "Evan Almighty" — and been God, there's not really much left to do, except play Nelson Mandela. [. . .] The movie's first third is stiff and dull. And through that section, so is Freeman. [. . .] And eventually, Freeman reaches that something deeper, not by clamping down on the performance, but by loosening his grip on it. [. . .] Suddenly, instead of just seeing Nelson Mandela as a great man, we get an idea of how a guy could survive 27 years of unjust imprisonment and, instead of becoming embittered and broken, emerge with a better sense of what makes human beings tick. He has a sense of humor as well as sense of responsibility. [. . .] It's hard to pinpoint the exact moment in "Invictus" when Freeman lets go of playing qualities — dignity, affability, fortitude — and starts playing a person. (Stephanie Zacharek, “Morgan Freeman: Making Mande...