The King of Masks Confucius once said, “Women are worthless.” And Chinese men believed him—at least not until The King of Masks, the English title of a Chinese film made in 1996 but released in Los Angeles in 1999. Entitled Bian Lian (changing masks), the setting is Sichuan province in the 1930s, with a few scenes […]

Films about Hawai`i are rare, and films in which Hawai`i-identified characters bring aloha to the U.S. mainland are even more rare. In Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), a happy mixed-race couple met and dated in Hawai`i, and then flies to San Francisco to receive approval for their proposed marriage, which came in the same year when

The Iron Giant In what film does an extraterrestrial being come to earth and become the private friend of a ten-year-old boy? The answer to this question in 1982 was E.T. In 1999, the answer is The Iron Giant, an animated feature directed by Brad Bird, based on the 1968 book with the same title by British Poet

  The Greek immigrant experience in Australia is at the center of Head On, directed by Ana Kokkinos and based on the novel Loaded by Christos Tsiolkas. Parents try to force children to behave as if they were still in Greece rather than the freer environment of Melbourne, Australia. Nineteen-year-old Ari (played by Alex Dimitriades), whose

  For centuries, “misfits” have been institutionalized as “insane.” In late medieval France, beggars were institutionalized as “insane” so that they would not clutter the open markets. In industrial democracies, a more scientific-sounding vocabulary was developed to accomplish the same objective — to isolate nonconformists lacking support from family and friends. In Girl, Interrupted director James Mangold

If you realize that you are attracted to persons of the same gender in a sexual way at age sixteen, what do you do when you think that your classmates, parents, and teachers will not accept you? This is the question posed in Get Real, a 1998 British film that was released this spring in Hollywood,

The General’s Daughter, based on the novel of the same title by Nelson DeMille which in turn is constructed from a true story, is a powerful film about discrimination against women in the military, recalling the publicity over the Tailhook incident and similar exposés. Directed by Simon West, the film takes place at a Fort MacCallum,

  Politics is the not the only arena that makes strange bedfellows. Those with health problems inevitably encounter health providers from very different backgrounds, as Flawless director and writer Joel Schumacher discovered while witnessing a close friend recover from a stroke (and Bruce Roberts, who developed the movie’s filmscore). So Walt Koontz (played by Robert De Niro)

Eyes Wide Shut is the posthumous project of perfectionist but eccentric chessplaying Stanley Kubrick, who died in 1999 before the release of the film. Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 short story Traumnovelle (Dream Story) consumed Kubrick’s imagination for more than twenty years as the basis for this film. At first Kubrick thought that the 1890s Vienna tale of

  Imagine that Hitler and his cohorts did not commit suicide as Germany went down to defeat. Instead, he stayed in his bunker with his close cohorts and plenty of food, undiscovered by the victorious allies; alternatively, he was tried and sentenced to life imprisonment in the same bunker with his friends cohorts; or perhaps,