A master class in intelligent acting, Frost/Nixon recreates the famous televised battle of wits between the disgraced former President, hoping to somehow rehabilitate his destroyed public image, and a British “celebrity” interviewer intent on making a name for himself in the States as a tough-minded reporter. Both men were, more or less, successful in their aims — but Ron Howard’s film wisely focuses less on their distinct hopes and plans for after the interviews and, instead, finds high drama and political intrigue in the unexpectedly fraught dynamic between these two very different men. Michael Sheen plays Frost as a suave terrier after the truth, while Frank Langella invested his Nixon with an uncanny mix of intimacy and bitterness that TIME’s Richard Corliss pegged, perfectly, as a kind of “forlorn grandeur.”
[youtube=http://youtu.be/Kj5-Qc2QRRw]