Richard Brody reviews “Gangster Squad,” and looks at the fake cinema of the season:

In all four films [“Gangster Squad,” “Zero Dark Thirty,” “Argo,” and “Amour”] the question of knowledge arises: what does the filmmaker know of his situations, his characters (and it doesn’t matter whether the subject at hand is historical or utterly fictitious), and what, in the “telling,” makes for an authentic experience? The short answer: none of the above. In all four, for different reasons, the filmmakers foreclose the characters, clamp down the implications, filter out the context, and thereby fake the results. These films may be the subject of discussion now but will end up on the scrap heap of cinematic history.

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Photograph: Warner Bros.