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KING ARTHUR REINVENTS A MUDDLED LEGEND Director Antoine Fuqua attempts to set the record straight in his epic film King Arthur. Despite previous accounts that depict his rule as idyllic, a foretaste of the birth of democracy in Britain, the current movie is a prequel to his supposed reign, set in 452. Titles at the […]

TWO BROTHERS DEMONSTRATES THE NEED TO RESPECT ANIMAL RIGHTS Only 5,000 tigers remain in the wild today, compared with approximately 100,000 a century ago, according to titles at the end of Two Brothers, directed by Political Film Society awardwinner Jean-Jacques Annaud. The film is in effect dedicated to what titles call the “king of the

IMAGINING ARGENTINA DEPICTS THE HORRORS OF THE “DIRTY WAR” In Operation Condor, which involved eight Latin American countries from the 1960s to the 1980s, thousands of political dissidents and leftists were rounded up by the police and never heard from again. Military and police practiced torture techniques that were learned while they were students at

THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW WARNS THE WORLD ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING For years, scientists have known that the warming of the earth might result in the onset of a new ice age, which would be caused when Arctic ice melted in sufficient quantity to stop the Gulf Stream in its tracks. Estimates of the critical years

CARANDIRU EXPOSES A SENSELESS PRISON MASSACRE IN BRASIL On October 2, 1992, some 111 inmates of the House of Detention at Carandiru, São Paulo, were brutally gunned down by a riot squad called in to break up a fight between rival gangs. The film Carandiru, directed by Hector Babenco, recreates those events with voiceovers by

ISTROY AN ANTI-WAR FILM? Homer’s The Iliad recounts a fascinating history of the fate of Troy, a city-state north of present-day Istanbul, complete with the intervention of Zeus and other gods, in the mid-12th century bc. The film Troy, directed by Wolfgang Peterson, attempts to recreate the secular events of that siege while humanizing several

THE ALAMO PROVIDES A PARADIGM FOR RETALIATION AGAINST TERRORISM After 9/11, George Bush encouraged members of the film industry to depict subjects that might deal with how Americans might respond to internal threats. The Alamo, directed by Texasphile John Lee Hancock, appears to be one such project, a contemporary remake of the 1960 John Wayne

THE GATEKEEPER ANSWERS THE MEXICANPHOBIA OF HARVARD PROFESSOR HUNTINGTON When The Gatekeeper begins, a talk-show radio host lambastes Mexicans, saying that they account for 90 percent of the 11 million illegal aliens in the United States, 70 percent of schoolchildren in California and 80 percent of the drug traffic. Further, the voice says that all

BEST POLITICAL FILMS OF 2003 SELECTED BY POLITICAL FILM SOCIETY MEMBERS Political Film Society members cast ballots during February and voted the following the best political films of 2003 in four categories: BEST FILM ON DEMOCRACY: Shattered Glass                   BEST FILM EXPOSÉ: Veronica Guerin                       BEST FILM ON HUMAN RIGHTS: The Magdalene Sisters      BEST FILM ON PEACE:

FINAL BALLOTING FOR BEST POLITICAL FILMS OF 2003 CONTINUES Many films were pre-nominated for Political Film Society awards for 2003. Since Political Film Society rules require the number of nominated films to be reduced to no more than five in each category, members voted in January to narrow the choices. Accordingly, the final ballot appears