Imagine a film based on a dramatic reading of Allen Ginsberg’s 1955 poem Howl. Now imagine an update of Ginsberg’s reading of Howl for gays in the last third of the twentieth century (out-of-the-closet Ginsberg died in 1997) and you have an understanding of the favorable reception of the film The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me, which […]

The Green Mile (1999) culminates with an electrocution of a sweet African American that went awry, dramatizing an actual incident involving the electric chair in Florida. Soon after the film came out, the use of the electric chair was banned in Florida. In the beginning of Monster’s Ball, the slang name for the electrocution, we see the

When Michael Moore embarked on a documentary about the closing of the General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan, his quest became a live drama on film in Roger & Me (1990). Similarly, Christian Bauer decided in 2000 to film his investigation of the disappearance of Allen Ross, his collaborator in seven documentaries over as many years, and

Mistitled, The Man Who Cried is about a woman and two men who cry at three poignant moments in the film, which already impressed European audiences as Les larmes d’un homme before cautiously opening at a few cinemas in Los Angeles. At the center of the story is Fegele (played as a child by Claudia

Based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s three-volume classic, director Peter Jackson has brought the first of the three volumes to the screen under the title The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, with the next two films to be released in 2002 and 2003. A fourteenth century hobbit named Bilbo Baggins (played by Ian Holm)

The title of the noir film L.I.E. stands for Long Island Expressway, but the story is about the etiology of prostitution among white male teenagers, a variation on the theme of The Ice Storm (1997) and similar critiques of the emptiness of a sterile suburbia of affluent homes. Howie Blitzer (played by Paul Franklin Dano) is a skinny

Blondes may have more fun, but are they taken seriously? The question forms the premise of Legally Blonde, based on the novel of the same title by Amanda Brown, a variation on the plot of Pushkin’s Eugen Onegin with cartoonized characters. Indeed, one particular blonde, Elle Woods (played by Reese Witherspoon), has more fun and insists

Construction on the Brooklyn Bridge began in 1869 and was completed in 1883. In Kate and Leopold, Stuart Besser (played by Live Schreiber) finds an H. G. Wellsian “crack in time” on the bridge which transports him from a spring day in 2001 to April 28, 1876, when the dashing Leopold, Duke of Albany (played by

Based on the novel of the same title by Gene Brewer, the film K-PAX is a psychological thriller directed by Iain Softley. All of a sudden in the middle of Grand Central Station, a man appears from nowhere. Seeing a woman whose handbag is being taken from her, he goes to help her. When police arrive, they

Just One Time, which expands to feature length an eight-minute short in Boy Shorts III (1998), is about a New York City opposite-sex couple who are very much in love and are scheduled to marry in ten days. Prior to exchanging vows before a priest, Anthony (played by Lane Janger, the director and cowriter of the film)