Here's another example* of what Frank Rich and Patrick Goldstein were writing about, Alex Williams:

Celebrity vérité
Still photographer Steven Klein tells stories with image-building mini dramas.
By Chris Lee, Special to The Times
Los Angeles Times, August 1, 2005

Depending on the beholder, the images exist either as art or as testament to the refined celebrity image-crafting that helped propel Jolie and Pitt's action-comedy, "Mr. & Mrs. Smith," to a $50-million opening weekend in June (just days after W, the women's fashion magazine, hit the newsstands).

The photos are also emblematic of the latest trend in celebrity portraiture.

No longer content to appear in photos wearing fancy clothes in glamorous locations, and increasingly leery of overexposure in the 24-hour celebrity news cycle, famous people want to act out scripted dramas in promotional stills — just as they would before movie cameras.

"It wasn't a photography shoot. It wasn't a celebrity shoot," Klein said. "We looked at it like a small, independent film, an investigation into the breakdown of a family."

http://snipurl.com/gnf8

* "The Cruise-Holmes antics, not to mention the concurrent shenanigans of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, add yet another variant to this mix, shrewdly identified by Patrick Goldstein of The Los Angeles Times as "a new rogue genre in which celebrities act out their own reality show, free from the constraints of a network time slot or a staged setting, like a boardroom or a desert island."
Frank Rich, New York Times, June 19, 2005