The Delicate Art of the Rifle is an independent film of 1997 that was released to the general public in Los Angeles during spring 1999. Directed by D.W. Harper, the movie portrays the ninety-six minutes in which a student, Charles Whitman, methodically gunned down forty-five strangers, killing fourteen, from the tallest building on the campus of […]

Life is full of choices, especially for the young and restless, who are not always delivered from temptations. Such is the moral of Dead Dogs, a film noir directed by Clay Eide that enjoyed a screening at the American Cinematheque on July 22, 1999. The tagline of the film asks, “What would you kill for?” Tom

“Freedom is forever.” That is the last voiceover of the nutty film Crazy in Alabama, directed by Antonio Banderas, based on the novel and screenplay by Mark Childress. The tagline “Sometimes you have to lose your mind to find your freedom” refers to two plots in the film — civil rights and spouse abuse. When the

In 1932, with an unemployment of about 33 percent, American voters elected Franklin Delano Roosevelt to be president. To put people back to work, one of the earliest innovations was the Works Progress Administration, which provided federal funds for various projects, mostly for construction. One WPA project, the Federal Theater Project, re-employed theatrical workers around

In The Corruptor, directed by James Foley, a war among rival gangs in New York’s Chinatown is in progress. The leader of one of the gangs, Henry Lee (played by Ric Young), who is The Corrupter in the story, has decided that the best way to eliminate his rivals is to provide what police officers

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

Director Matthew Bright loves young women, who are at the center of his films of sex and violence. He also loves children’s stories. In Confessions of a Trickbaby, which enjoyed a prescreening at the American Cinematheque on July 15, 1999, he tells a variant of the Hansel und Gretel fairy tale by focusing on two girls,

The fate of unwanted children is usually left out of debates on abortion; the film is based on the novel of the same title by John Irving. Not so in The Cider House Rules, directed by Lasse Hallström. The film takes place in the 1940s, beginning at an orphanage in St. Clouds, Maine, where illegitimate children

  The Hongkong film Meishaonian zhi, directed by Yonfan, has had several retitlings. One title, Bishonen, translates Beauty, though another title is Double Life of a Cop. Regardless, the film is a love story involving gay men in Hongkong that tries to provide fictional background for a scandal within the port city in which a prominent business executive possessed

  Discrimination, life, and love among women in Vancouver, British Columbia, are featured in the film Better than Chocolate, directed by Anne Wheeler. Nineteen-year-old Maggie (played by Karyn Dwyer) has just dropped out of college, is sleeping on the couch in a back room of the Lesbian-run Ten Percent Bookstore, and is trying to get her