Fathers are not well understood by their wives or daughters, according to About Schmidt, a film based on the novel by Louis Begley. When the film begins, Warren Schmidt (played by Jack Nicholson) awaits the arrival of 5:00 PM to leave his office at Woodmen Insurance Company in Omaha so that he can drive to his […]

8 Women (8 Femmes), directed by François Ozon, takes place at Christmas in a snowbound family estate in the 1950s, thus the French answer to Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap (1952). Early in the film, Marcel (played by Dominique Lamure), the husband and only man in the story, is exposed as having been stabbed fatally in

  “Dozens” is a verbal game, with roots in Africa, in which one person insults (raps) another, a game that goes back and forth. Now known as “rap,” the contest is set to a rhythmic beat (iambic pentameter) nowadays, though rap music is a monologue when the villain is the social system. In 8 Mile, Jimmy

  Two brothers lost their mother when they are small children, and their father was mostly on the road in a vain effort to achieve fame as a third baseman. When the father became too old to play, he retired to México, watched a lot of baseball on television, including his son Terry’s big-league career,

  Just as serious films about the Vietnam War haunted the 1980s, so now in the late 1990s World War II is the war of choice for filmmakers. Except that not all are so serious. If in 1998 Life Is Beautiful could make filmviewers ponder about the need for hope and humor to make life meaningful, now

Only a master thief can catch a lesser thief, according to Catch Me If You Can, directed by Stephen Spielberg. When the film begins, Frank Abagnale, Sr. (played by Christopher Willem), is accepting an award from the New Rochelle Kiwanis Club, an award based on con games with the townspeople. IRS is after him for some

Bollywood/Hollywood, directed by Deepa Mehta, is a quirky love story involving Rahul Seth (played by Rahul Khanna), a successful Indian entrepreneur in Toronto who is looking for a spouse because his parents insist that he should be betrothed before wedding bells ring for his soon-to-be-married sister. Rahul’s fiancée is a Hollywood star, whom he brings

Abandon, directed by Stephen Gaghan, is about a young man, Embry Larkin (played by Charlie Hunnam), who disappeared two years earlier. When the film begins, the missing persons case is assigned to Detective Wade Handler (played by Benjamin Bratt) because he was the heir to a large fortune. The law does not allow a missing

Political Film Society awardwinner Jim Sheridan has directed many powerful biographical films, from In the Name of the Father (1993) to The Boxer (1998). In America, therefore, comes as somewhat of a surprise, showing a sentimentalism that doubtless informed his previous classics but was hidden from view. The story is loosely autobiographical, portraying Irish immigrants to America in New York

Civil Brand, directed by Neema Barnette, asks us to believe that twenty-five African American female inmates of a racially segregated Tennessee prison won a lawsuit against administrators to end a reign of terror. The prison is maximum security Whitehead Correctional Institute, which is managed by a corporation in the private sector that makes up rules