The “Chris Rock Show,” which started on HBO in 1997, has featured a character named Pootie Tang (played by Lance Crouthier), whose speech is in a patois that is unintelligible. Not just two or three odd phrases, as in The Lion King (1994). All Pootie Tang’s speech is in a pseudo-Swahili tongue Tang. Lance Crouthier, who plays […]

When The Pledge begins, a nine-year-old girl is brutally killed during the winter in the snow-filled mountains near Reno. Detective Jerry Black (played by Jack Nicolson) of the Monash County police goes to the scene of the crime and collects evidence, learning that similar cases twice occurred in the last eight years. In doing so,

What would happen if you placed an ad in a Personals column, indicating that you were looking for a suitable marriage partner? Why would you do so? These two questions are both posed but answered in that order in The Personals (Zheng hun qi shi), a Taiwanese film directed and cowritten by Chen Kuo-fu, based on

Pearl Buck, America’s most famous missionary, lived in China from her childhood to the age of 32. During the next fifty years of her life, she wrote more than eighty-five books, receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938, though her books were banned in China until 1994 because she once criticized the acting ability

Half of all marriages today end in divorce. In Pants on Fire, directed by Rocky Collins, that statistic is maintained. When the film begins, Assistant District Attorney Max Hammer (played by Harry O’Reilly) is married to Julie Hammer (played by Christy Baron), an elementary schoolteacher, and Barry Grogan (played by Neil Maffin), a fellow teacher at

Creative geniuses are often tortured by obsessive impulses. No greater   example can be found in the life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who is at the center of Pandaemonium, a BBC film directed by Julien Temple. When the film begins, we see Coleridge (played by Linus Roache) entering a reception for poets, collapsing on the floor, then

Ocean’s 11 is a remake of Ocean’s Eleven (1960), with George Clooney playing Danny Ocean rather than Frank Sinatra. When the film begins, Danny is discharged from a New Jersey with two goals in mind — to pull the biggest heist ever and to regain the affections of his estranged spouse Tess (played by Julia Roberts). After reconnecting

O, based on Shakespeare’s Othello with some passages from the Verdi opera, takes place in Palmetto Grove Academy, a prep school in Charleston, South Carolina. The Othello is African American Odin James (played by Mekhi Phifer), a star basketball player on scholarship who has attracted the romantic attentions of an upper-class Desdemona named Desi Brable

No One Sleeps, written, directed, and produced by Jochen Hick, focuses on a theory regarding the origin of the HIV virus. Although most medical authorities believe that the HIV virus was originally found within monkeys in Africa and then transmitted by human contact, the link between monkey-handlers in Africa and the first diagnosed cases among

No Man’s Land, directed and written by Danis Tanovich, tries to dramatize the absurdity of the current UN-enforced peace in Bosnia. Chiki (played by Branko Djurich) is a Bosnian, and Nino (played by Rene Bitorajac) is a Serb during the Bosnia War in 1993. When the fog lifts one morning, a few Serbs successfully attack