Life, directed by Ted Demme, presents a different Mississippi—where black men are imprisoned whether guilty or otherwise. Different except in one fascinating respect—Ned Beatty is again cast as an unprejudiced white prison superintendent. The film focuses on two inmates of a prison farm, played by Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence, New Yorkers in Mississippi to

In Cookie’s Fortune, director Robert Altman takes us to Holly Springs, Mississippi (a town halfway between Memphis and Tupelo) for a mystery caper. Although filmviewers and two of the actors know who is responsible for a death, the police do not, but the real mysteries are wrapped up in the Faulknerian characters, their foibles, and

The School of Flesh, the English translation of the film L’Ecole de la Chair, is based on a novel not yet translated into English by Yukio Mishima, whose gay proclivities came to an end though suicide in 1970. The film, released in France in 1998 and shoehorned into art theatres in the United States in

In the 1998 film Shakespeare in Love, Queen Elizabeth is played by Judi Dench, who won an Oscar® for best supporting actress. The premise of the film is much less serious than Elizabeth: The Virgin Queen, namely, that Shakespeare must have written love sonnets and the play Romeo and Juliet because he was himself in

Many films have been made about Queen Elizabeth. Our images have perhaps already been shaped by the portrayal of Bette Davis, who made the queen out to be almost a tough Lesbian. Along comes sensitive Cate Blanchett, who shows how an unprepared not-so-virgin princess achieved maturity as a queen through bitter experience. In Shekhar Kapur’s