The entire month of August is a time for vacation in Italy, as we are reminded in the beginning frames of Bread and Tulips (Pane e Tulipani), directed by Silvio Soldini. Fortysomething housewife Rosalba (played by Licia Maglietta) is on a tour with her husband Mimmo (played by Antonio Catania), who sells plumbing fixtures, and […]

The irreverent The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) provoked so many pickets that filmmakers have been reluctant to pose religious hypotheticals, or so it seemed until a similarly daring The Body was released one week after Good Friday. The hypothetical posed in The Body, from a novel of the same title by Richard Ben Sapir, is “What would happen if

  The civil war in Somalia in the early 1990s caused a shortage of food that caused the death of some 300,000 persons. In an attempt to stop the famine, the United Nations dispatched food aid, but forces loyal to a local warlord, Mohammed Farah Aidid monopolized distribution in the port city of Mogadishu to

In Big Eden, a thirtysomething Montana artist named Henry Hart (played by Ayre Gross) who moved to New York a decade or more ago to achieve his career goals and enjoy gay life, is suddenly informed that his grandpa has had a stroke. As his grandpa is his only living blood relative, he decides to fly

Betty is about a film star, Betty Monday (played by Cheryl Pollak), who one day drives to Palm Desert to rent a house from a retired couple in order to find a life for herself. In so doing she fails to report for work on a $70 million Christmas movie. The reason is that she is

Bangkok, the capital of Thailand, is one of the safest cities in the world for a tourist. The free feeling as one walks the streets of the City of Angels is only marred by overzealous pimps in the Patpong section of the city. Gun control is very strict, with licenses issued for gun ownership only

Audition (Odishon), directed by Takashi Miike and based on a novel by Ryu Murakami, is a film that may so shock viewers interested in kinky sex to abandon any thought of experimenting with sadomasochism. The story centers on Shigeharu Aoyama (played by Ryo Ishibashi), whose wife dies while his only child, a son, is nine years

The film Anti-trust clearly purports to be an exposé of someone more ruthless than Bill Gates; interestingly, Sun Microsystems and Linux were consulted for the movie. Directed by Peter Howitt, the protagonist is Milo Hoffman (played by Ryan Phillippe), who has followed up his graduation from Stanford to make a computer software breakthrough along with his partner

  Adoption can present significant psychological problems to the adoptee if handled incorrectly. In An American Rhapsody, the problems are explored in more depth than any previous film. The location for much of the film is Hungary, where Suzanne (later played as a teenager by Scarlett Johansson) is born to affluent parents as Communist rule descends

Megan Rose (played by Mika Boorem), the daughter of Senator Hank Rose, is kidnapped from Cathedral School under the vigilant security of Secret Service Special Agent Jezzie Flannigan (played by Monica Potter) in the film Along Came a Spider, based on a novel of the same title by James Patterson, the same novelist who wrote the