"Which is where “Ides of March” came in. That film teams a pair of stars who stand on either side of the generational line: George Clooney, who has hit his superstar peak (and who is now at about the same point where, say, Cary Grant was in the 1950s), and Ryan Gosling, who is just coming into his own. Everyone knows who Clooney is, as well as his cohort: Brad Pitt, Hugh Grant, Robert Downey Jr., Johnny Depp, Will Smith, Denzel Washington, Russell Crowe. They’re a generation of actors who picked up the gauntlet in the 1990s, battled their way through heartthrob and flavor-of-the-month status to achieve a certain longevity. They’ve now reached their prime or are just gliding past it. Gosling is now where Clooney or Pitt were 15 years or so ago: an actor with some strong credits but not quite the mass-audience awareness. Gosling and Joseph Gordon-Levitt are part of that new generation. And a few others: Jake Gyllenhaal, Ewan McGregor, James Franco, Adrien Brody, even (we’ll see) Seth Rogen and Jesse Eisenberg. You could put Leonardo DiCaprio at the head of this particular class, though he’s a few years older than Gosling and Gordon-Levitt. He’s the group’s biggest superstar, Scorsese’s new chosen muse; he is to his peer group what De Niro and Pacino were to their generation – the gold standard." — Marshall Fine, Hollywood & Fine