The tagline of The Blair Witch Project is “In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittesville, Maryland, while shooting a documentary. One year later, their footage was found.” Titles at the beginning of the film tell us about the three who set forth into the woods to do a documentary about […]

Soon after Caracara begins, there is a knock at the Manhattan apartment of Rachel Sutherland (played by Natasha Henstridge), an employee at the American Museum of Natural History who keeps a pet caracara. (The bird in the film, however, is a hawk, not a caracara.) The two men flash FBI badges and offer her $100 per day

  In some cultures a wife is a virtual slave of a husband. In the United States, the days when all women were totally submissive to their husbands are long past. In Surrender Dorothy, directed and written by Kevin B. DiNovis, the protagonist Trevor (played by Peter Pryor) is terrified by the independence of women. A

MICHAEL MOORE’S THE BIG ONE EXPOSES ARROGANT CEOs Although a documentary, not eligible for a Political Film Society award, Michael Moore (of Roger & Me fame) films his book tour of the United States and efforts to interview corporation heads regarding massive employment layoffs and corporate welfare in the context of megaprofits.  A highlight of

In Alain Berliner’s The Wall (Le Mur, with English subtitles), the year 2000 approaches in Belgium, a country of 10 million in a territory about the same size as Maryland. Although Belgians were ruled for nearly 1,800 years by conquerors, including Rome, the Franks, Burgundy, Spain, Austria, and France, then handed to Holland in 1815 after the

Steam: The Turkish Bath   One of the most puzzling mysteries concerns one’s sexual identity. When does a man suddenly decide that he is gay? For many men who have never had a sexual encounter with a member of the opposite sex, the realization often comes quite early, before puberty. What about the married man

The Spanish Prisoner, directed and written by David Mamet, is a film about a con. Similar to The Maltese Falcon (1931), nearly everyone involved is greedy and will stop at nothing to get their hands on something of extreme value. In The Spanish Prisoner, the thing of value is a “process,” developed by a research scientist who works

  At least one major film each year of late has been devoted to the subject of death. In almost every case, the aim has been to soften the blow. Young adults are learning to respect the elderly as never before while the average age of Americans increases, but coping with death seems difficult for