CINEMA: DEATH OF A SALESMAN

POOR RICHARD NIXON: THE MOST human President of the television age. A better statesman than politician, a tireless but graceless campaigner, a successful salesman who was liked but not well liked, the man seemed uncomfortable in his own skin. The canniest moments in the three-plus hours of Nixon, Oliver Stone's dense, ultimately disappointing biopic, capture Nixon at his most pathetically endearing--the Commander in Chief as klutz. In a telling vignette lifted from Woodward and Bernstein's The Final Days, Nixon (Anthony Hopkins) gets so frustrated at his inability to remove a medicine safety cap that he finally bites it off.

Stone typically...