In Spy Game, directed by Tony Scott, agents of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) work at cross purposes to undermine one another and thus the effectiveness of the agency. Retiring Special Agent Nathan Muir (played by Robert Redford) hears that his onetime protégée Tom Bishop (played by Brat Pitt) has been captured by authorities in China […]
NOMINATIONS CLOSE FOR POLITICAL FILM SOCIETY AWARDS During 2000, more than 20 films were nominated for various Political Film Society awards. Rules require only five nominations per category, so members can now narrow the choices. The ballot below has a threefold choice—accept, drop, or undecided. To refresh your memory, consult reviews posted during 2000. OFFICIAL
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O Brother, Where Art Thou? is nearly a camp version of portions of Homer’s The Odyssey, or so we are told at the beginning of the film, directed by Joel Coen. When the film begins, Ulysses Everett McGill (played by George Clooney), Pete (played by John Turturro), and Delmar (played by Tim Black Nelson) are escaping from
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As a comic book, X-Men has the distinction of being very political. Directed by Bryan Singer, the film X-Men begins in the Warsaw ghetto of 1944, with an incident in which Magneto as a child (played by Brett Morris) overpowers Nazi police but otherwise is unable to stop the Holocaust. The tagline of the movie, “Join the evolution,” informs
Chessplaying requires extraordinary concentration, so those who excel may think of nothing else until they encounter burnout. The Luzhin Defence, a British film based on the book Zashchita Luzhina (1930) by Vladimir Nabokov (translated into English as The Defence), focuses on Aleksandr Luzhin (played by John Turturro), who is a chess grandmaster about to enter a world
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In 1969, a stage play Boesman & Lena indicting South Africa’s apartheid was performed in South Africa; in 1970, off Broadway. A film followed in 1974. Some twenty-five years later Boesman & Lena has been brought to the screen again by director John Berry, who died late last year. Danny Glover stars as Boesman and Angela Bassett as Lena.
TRAFFIC EXPOSES THE HYPOCRISY OF THE WAR ON DRUGS The War on Drugs has been exposed as a fraud in Traffic, which is based in part on the 1990 BBC miniseries Traffik, which focused on drug traffic from Pakistan to Britain. Directed by Steven Soderbergh, whose Erin Brockovich was nominated for two awards earlier this
TRAFFIC EXPOSES THE HYPOCRISY OF THE WAR ON DRUGS The War on Drugs has been exposed as a fraud in Traffic, which is based in part on the 1990 BBC miniseries Traffik, which focused on drug traffic from Pakistan to Britain. Directed by Steven Soderbergh, whose Erin Brockovich was nominated for two awards earlier this
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THIRTEEN DAYS RELIVES A TIME WHEN THE WORLD WAS AT THE BRINK OF NUCLEAR WAR A nuclear winter nearly began in October 1962, when American leaders pondered a military response to the installation of more than two dozen offensive SS-4 nuclear missiles in Cuba that could hit nearly every city in the United States. The
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CASTRO’S HUMAN RIGHTS RECORD EXPOSED IN BEFORE NIGHT FALLS Before Night Falls gives filmviewers a unique opportunity to get an inside look at Cuba since the revolution of 1959. Director Julian Schnabel (nominated by the Political Film Society in 1996 for directing Basquiat), exposes the contradictions of the Castro regime in a bio-pic about acclaimed
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