China as a unified country did not exist until the third century B.C. Instead, various kingdoms rose and fell until, when the film begins, there were seven kingdoms, the most powerful of which was the Zhou dynasty, which ruled China from 1122 to 255 B.C. In The Emperor and the Assassin (Jing ke ci qin wang), […]
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Imagine that Hitler and his cohorts did not commit suicide as Germany went down to defeat. Instead, he stayed in his bunker with his close cohorts and plenty of food, undiscovered by the victorious allies; alternatively, he was tried and sentenced to life imprisonment in the same bunker with his friends cohorts; or perhaps,
Edge of Seventeen, directed by David Moreton, is a coming-of-age story about a teenager who gradually discovers that he is gay and has to adjust to a lifestyle where the rules are learned the hard way. During summer break 1984 between his junior and senior year, seventeen-year-old Eric (played by Chris Stafford, who is the
Life is full of choices, especially for the young and restless, who are not always delivered from temptations. Such is the moral of Dead Dogs, a film noir directed by Clay Eide that enjoyed a screening at the American Cinematheque on July 22, 1999. The tagline of the film asks, “What would you kill for?” Tom
The Delicate Art of the Rifle is an independent film of 1997 that was released to the general public in Los Angeles during spring 1999. Directed by D.W. Harper, the movie portrays the ninety-six minutes in which a student, Charles Whitman, methodically gunned down forty-five strangers, killing fourteen, from the tallest building on the campus of
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In 1932, with an unemployment of about 33 percent, American voters elected Franklin Delano Roosevelt to be president. To put people back to work, one of the earliest innovations was the Works Progress Administration, which provided federal funds for various projects, mostly for construction. One WPA project, the Federal Theater Project, re-employed theatrical workers around
“Freedom is forever.” That is the last voiceover of the nutty film Crazy in Alabama, directed by Antonio Banderas, based on the novel and screenplay by Mark Childress. The tagline “Sometimes you have to lose your mind to find your freedom” refers to two plots in the film — civil rights and spouse abuse. When the
In The Corruptor, directed by James Foley, a war among rival gangs in New York’s Chinatown is in progress. The leader of one of the gangs, Henry Lee (played by Ric Young), who is The Corrupter in the story, has decided that the best way to eliminate his rivals is to provide what police officers
Director Matthew Bright loves young women, who are at the center of his films of sex and violence. He also loves children’s stories. In Confessions of a Trickbaby, which enjoyed a prescreening at the American Cinematheque on July 15, 1999, he tells a variant of the Hansel und Gretel fairy tale by focusing on two girls,
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In Cookie’s Fortune, director Robert Altman takes us to Holly Springs, Mississippi (a town halfway between Memphis and Tupelo) for a mystery caper. Although filmviewers and two of the actors know who is responsible for a death, the police do not, but the real mysteries are wrapped up in the Faulknerian characters, their foibles, and the