Steam: The Turkish Bath   One of the most puzzling mysteries concerns one’s sexual identity. When does a man suddenly decide that he is gay? For many men who have never had a sexual encounter with a member of the opposite sex, the realization often comes quite early, before puberty. What about the married man […]

The Spanish Prisoner, directed and written by David Mamet, is a film about a con. Similar to The Maltese Falcon (1931), nearly everyone involved is greedy and will stop at nothing to get their hands on something of extreme value. In The Spanish Prisoner, the thing of value is a “process,” developed by a research scientist who works

The Pentagon Wars, directed by Richard Benjamin, is an exposé based on the true story of the costly development of the Bradley Fighting Machine tank, which first emerged in 1975 as a concept of a new, super-duper high-tech weapon but awaited the large increase in the military budget under President Ronald Reagan. A committee of

  At least one major film each year of late has been devoted to the subject of death. In almost every case, the aim has been to soften the blow. Young adults are learning to respect the elderly as never before while the average age of Americans increases, but coping with death seems difficult for

  In Hurlyburly, adopted from the David Rabe’s stage play of the 1980s by director Anthony Drazan, the male characters drink, snort coke, have emotionless heterosex, or just have no emotions at all. When all is said and done, the characters seem too dissolute and the plot seems preposterous, but then the title well describes the

The Hanging Garden is a story about an Irish family somewhere along the coast of Nova Scotia, where luscious flowers grow in a garden nearly every month of the year, and many of the characters are named after flowers, whose characteristics define their personalities. Titles announce three chapters in the nonchronological story, which is directed, produced,

In Fishbelly White, a farm boy has become a teenager but still retains his pet chicken, and his favorite trick is to put the head of the chicken in his mouth for several seconds. The boy puts the chicken in the basket of his bicycle as he pedals around the countryside. Although he wants to be

Cowboy Bebop (Tengoku no tobira), directed by Shinichirô Watanabe, is a Japanese animation. The film has a schmaltzy filmscore, intended to be jazz; hence, the name “bebop.” The central characters are bounty hunters, referred to as “cowboys” at an early point in the film, and the location is Alba City on Mars in the twenty-second

The Red Violin (Le Violon Rouge in French-speaking Canada) is about a musical instrument with perfect acoustical qualities that carried a curse on its many owners from the time it was made by a Niccòlo Bussoti (played by Carlo Cecchi) in 1681 until the present day, when it is sold for millions at an auction house