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

What would happen if everyone on earth died except for one man? The premise of The Last Man, the film deals with not only Alan (played by David Arnott) but also two other survivors-Sara (played by Jeri Ryan) and Rafael (played by Dan Montgomery). Before discovering the other two survivors, Alan robs a store to get

The King of Masks Confucius once said, “Women are worthless.” And Chinese men believed him—at least not until The King of Masks, the English title of a Chinese film made in 1996 but released in Los Angeles in 1999. Entitled Bian Lian (changing masks), the setting is Sichuan province in the 1930s, with a few scenes

Films about Hawai`i are rare, and films in which Hawai`i-identified characters bring aloha to the U.S. mainland are even more rare. In Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), a happy mixed-race couple met and dated in Hawai`i, and then flies to San Francisco to receive approval for their proposed marriage, which came in the same year when

The Iron Giant In what film does an extraterrestrial being come to earth and become the private friend of a ten-year-old boy? The answer to this question in 1982 was E.T. In 1999, the answer is The Iron Giant, an animated feature directed by Brad Bird, based on the 1968 book with the same title by British Poet

  The Greek immigrant experience in Australia is at the center of Head On, directed by Ana Kokkinos and based on the novel Loaded by Christos Tsiolkas. Parents try to force children to behave as if they were still in Greece rather than the freer environment of Melbourne, Australia. Nineteen-year-old Ari (played by Alex Dimitriades), whose

  For centuries, “misfits” have been institutionalized as “insane.” In late medieval France, beggars were institutionalized as “insane” so that they would not clutter the open markets. In industrial democracies, a more scientific-sounding vocabulary was developed to accomplish the same objective — to isolate nonconformists lacking support from family and friends. In Girl, Interrupted director James Mangold

If you realize that you are attracted to persons of the same gender in a sexual way at age sixteen, what do you do when you think that your classmates, parents, and teachers will not accept you? This is the question posed in Get Real, a 1998 British film that was released this spring in Hollywood,