Angela’s Ashes is perhaps the saddest film of 1999, but with a happy ending. Directed by Alan Parker, the film is based on the autobiography of Frank McCourt, who is played by three actors at various stages of his life (Joseph Breen, Ciaran Owens, and Michael Legge). McCourt also co-wrote the screenplay. The story begins in […]
The “soap opera” is a very American genre, so we should not be surprised to learn that films depicting enigmas faced by ordinary Americans will captivate many Americans. The Ozzie & Harriet days of simple problems are gone, so the late 1990s are likely to confront Americans with more existential dilemmas. We should have
In 8MM, a widow asks private detective Tom Welles (played by Nicholas Cage) to find out whether a film in the safe of her late husband, in which a young woman is murdered, is a real or simulated “snuff film.” Her attorney Longdale (played by Anthony Heald) picks Welles, as he seems to be an amateur
Director Bruce Beresford, whose Driving Miss Daisy was nominated for a Political Film Society award in 1990, has been fascinated with the criminal justice system in most of his best films. In this case, there is an appearance of murder when a husband secretly arranges his own disappearance from a sailboat while anchored down for the
The tagline of The Blair Witch Project is “In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittesville, Maryland, while shooting a documentary. One year later, their footage was found.” Titles at the beginning of the film tell us about the three who set forth into the woods to do a documentary about
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Soon after Caracara begins, there is a knock at the Manhattan apartment of Rachel Sutherland (played by Natasha Henstridge), an employee at the American Museum of Natural History who keeps a pet caracara. (The bird in the film, however, is a hawk, not a caracara.) The two men flash FBI badges and offer her $100 per day
A Civil Action, in contrast, follows a well-established formula in presenting a true story based on a well-researched book by journalist Jonathan Harr: Big business (Beatrice Foods and W. R. Grace) has harmed humble individuals, causing death and disease, by dumping toxic waste into the drinking water of Woburn, Massachusetts. Jan Schlichtmann, a lawyer who
Based on James Jones’s autobiographical novel of the same title that was unsuccessfully made into a film in 1964, The Thin Red Line has been nominated for an award as this year’s best film in raising the consciousness of filmviewers on the advantages of peaceful methods for resolving conflicts. Filmed in the Solomon Islands, where
1998–THE MOST POLITICAL YEAR IN RECENT FILMMAKING Nominations for the best political films of 1998 closed on December 31. Fifteen films have been nominated, a record in the twelve-year history of the Political Film Society. According to the rules governing awards, film directors have been sent notifications that their films have been nominated. Since there
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In some cultures a wife is a virtual slave of a husband. In the United States, the days when all women were totally submissive to their husbands are long past. In Surrender Dorothy, directed and written by Kevin B. DiNovis, the protagonist Trevor (played by Peter Pryor) is terrified by the independence of women. A