The General’s Daughter, based on the novel of the same title by Nelson DeMille which in turn is constructed from a true story, is a powerful film about discrimination against women in the military, recalling the publicity over the Tailhook incident and similar exposés. Directed by Simon West, the film takes place at a Fort MacCallum, […]

Eyes Wide Shut is the posthumous project of perfectionist but eccentric chessplaying Stanley Kubrick, who died in 1999 before the release of the film. Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 short story Traumnovelle (Dream Story) consumed Kubrick’s imagination for more than twenty years as the basis for this film. At first Kubrick thought that the 1890s Vienna tale of

  Politics is the not the only arena that makes strange bedfellows. Those with health problems inevitably encounter health providers from very different backgrounds, as Flawless director and writer Joel Schumacher discovered while witnessing a close friend recover from a stroke (and Bruce Roberts, who developed the movie’s filmscore). So Walt Koontz (played by Robert De Niro)

  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),

  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

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