Imagine a comedy by Edgar Allan Poe! The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar (1845), Poe’s short story, is anything but. Brought to the screen by director Gil Cates, Jr., as The Mesmerist, the attempt at comedy is a butchery of Poe’s genius. Fewer cinema patrons stayed through the entire screening that I attended, but some remained […]

Swept Away, directed by Guy Ritchie, begins when Anthony Leighton (played by Bruce Greenwood), a wealthy corporate executive, charters a small Italian fishing yacht for a brief vacation with his wife Amber (played by Madonna, the director’s spouse) and two other couples. The women are extremely bitchy, insulting the Italian crew on board, especially Giuseppe

Star Wars: Episode II–Attack of the Clones, as expected, features a lot of high-tech violence due to traitors and treachery. “Politicians are not to be trusted” we hear early in the film. The story begins ten years after Episode I with an attempted assassination of Senator Padmé Amidala (played by Natalie Portman), whereupon jedi Obi-Wan Kenobi (played

Spider-Man, directed by Sam Raimi, is yet another recent film bringing a comic book character to the screen. Peter Parker (played by Tobey Maguire), an intelligent but nerdy high school senior in Queens, provides voiceovers at the beginning that the story is about Mary Jane Watson (played by Kirsten Dunst), a girl whom he has

  One day Ted Brooks (played by Cuba Gooding, Jr.) learns in Snow Dogs that someone named Lucy Watkins has named him as an heir to her estate in Tolketna, Alaska. A dentist practicing in Miami, he now realizes that he was adopted, and that Lucy was his birthmother. Accordingly, he goes to Tolketna for a reading

When the Soviet Union launched space satellite Sputnik in 1957, the expression “the Russians are coming” gained currency. The successful film The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), though about extraterrestrials, was subsequently interpreted as a paradigm for the situation in which Russians might try but fail to conquer the United States, and I Married a Monster from

Insofar as Scarlet Diva is autobiographical, the message is that a goodlooking actress cannot avoid becoming a junkie and a slut. The author, director, and actress playing the title role is Asia Argento, a talented Italian who comes from a family of artists. The most quotable epigram in the film is “An artist is a prostitute.” When

What were living conditions like in France during World War II? Safe Conduct (Laissez-Passer), directed by Bertrand Tavernier provides a 170-minute window into that era through the eyes of a film company; incidents in the movie are based on actual events from 1942-1944 and are based on the book by the famous novelist Jean Devaivre. In

Perdition” is the name of a fictional settlement along a quiet Lake Michigan beach in the film Road to Perdition. The movie, however, begins in suburban Illinois, and the principal characters, Michael Sullivan (played by Tom Hanks) and twelve-year-old Michael, Jr. (played by Tyler Hoechlin), end up in Perdition by a route that can best be

The Ring, directed by Gore Verbinski, is a remake of Hideo Nakata’s Ringu (1998), in turn based on a novel by Koji Suzuki. The film pushes the envelope from the “I see dead people” theme of The Sixth Sense (1999) into The Blair Witch Project (1999) mystery. When the film begins, Katie (played by Amber Tamblyn), the best friend of Rachel