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The tagline of Ride with the Devil summarizes much about the film: “In a no-man’s land between North and South, you didn’t fight for the Blue or the Gray . . . you fought for your friends and your family.” Directed by Ang Lee, Ride with the Devil is based on the novel Woe to Live On by Daniel Woodrell, whose […]

Why are the lives of gays and Lesbians so turbulent at times? Most observers would not even care to pose the question, whether gay or straight. Writer/director P.J. Castellaneta dares to ask and provides his advice in the title Relax . . . It’s Just Sex even before the film begins. As if to invite straights to

In The Opposite of Sex, DeeDee Truitt (played by Christina Ricci) narrates a film about love triangles involving homosexuals, bisexuals, and heterosexuals. DeeDee is sixteen years old, unhappy living with her stepmother, so she travels from her home in Tennessee to Indiana, showing up on the doorstep of her brother Bill (played by Martin Donovan), an

In My Name is Joe, the problems of working-class Glasgow, Scotland, during the period of high unemployment under Margaret Thatcher’s era are highlighted. Although the film was highly acclaimed in Britain when released in 1998 and relegated to an art film theatre circuit in the United States in 1999, because the setting and dialog are unfamiliar

The Messenger – The Story of Joan of Arc In the fifth century, the Frankish kings siezed control of much of France, but had to defend the territory against attacks by Viking warriors. In 991 the French capitulated in the Treaty of St. Clair-sur-Epte, establishing the dukedom of Normande, and the Norsemen soon took over

If humans had been replaced by artificial intelligence copies to bring about a rational world, what would uncloned humans do? This is the premise for the sci-fi film The Matrix, directed by Andy and Larry Wachowski, though we are supposed to understand that it is the 21st century, and that the machines waged war on the

Lucie Aubrac During World War II the Germans occupied France and ruled through a puppet government. Some French collaborated with the Germans; others resisted. A dramatic episode of the French Resistance in 1943 is brought to the screen in the 1997 French film Lucie Aubrac, which opened in the Los Angeles area during fall 1999. The

Director Barry Levinson, who won the Political Film Society’s award for Good Morning Vietnam and nomination for last year’s Wag the Dog, can forget neither his Baltimore roots nor his Jewish parents, orthodox on one side and heterodox on he other. In Liberty Heights, his fourth effort to remind the rest of us that many Jewish Americans in the

Limbo   Beautiful Alaska is the location of Limbo, a film that features characters who have failed to succeed in the lower forty-eight states and have decided to try out the challenge of America’s last frontier. John Sayles, who wrote, directed, and edited Limbo, as usual selects a small town (here Port Henry, but actually Juneau) as

Life, directed by Ted Demme, presents a different Mississippi—where black men are imprisoned whether guilty or otherwise. Different except in one fascinating respect—Ned Beatty is again cast as an unprejudiced white prison superintendent. The film focuses on two inmates of a prison farm, played by Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence, New Yorkers in Mississippi to