Movies: It's His Same Old Story

Oliver Stone's Alexander is a Greek war epic that somehow still seems to be about Vietnam

The big year-end movies are often solemn, sensitive items: women's work after 11 months of guy stuff. But Oliver Stone is alpha male incarnate, and his pictures, from Platoon to JFK to Any Given Sunday, are celebrations and autopsies of overweening machismo. Alexander, his first fiction film in five years, promises plenty more of the same. Instead of a stately epic--like Robert Rossen's 1956 Alexander the Great, with Richard Burton as the globe-annexing god-king--Stone presents a riot of sensations, military and erotic, through which Alexander (Colin Farrell) has to hack like an intrepid soldier through an unfamiliar jungle. All of which...

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