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TAKEN CELEBRATES BUSH’S CIA The recently released Taken, directed by Pierre Morel, involves an effort by former CIA agent Bryan Mills (played by Liam Neeson) to rescue his daughter Amanda (played by Katie Cassidy) from a kidnapping in Paris preparatory to confinement in a condition of white slavery. The film stresses Mills’s love for his […]

GOOD IS NOT ABOUT A GOOD MAN In Good, Germans once again can pat themselves on the back for not being “real” Nazis. The story is a fictional account about how someone unsympathetic to Nazism in 1933 (a “good” German) becomes a member of the SS during World War II (a “bad” German). Based on

Adam Resurrected, directed by Paul Schrader, also involves flashbacks, tracing the fictional life of Germany’s greatest clown, Adam Stein (played by Jeff Goldblum), who one night amuses Klein (played by Willem Dafoe). When Klein later becomes a Nazi SS officer, he saves Adam’s life on condition that he will amuse him by playing the role

One Day You’ll Understand (Plus tard), a French film directed by Amos Gitai, starts with Victor Bastien (played by Hippolyte Giradot), baptized as a Catholic, who is searching for a buried past. The film traces Victor’s quest from his childhood discovery of unexplained mementoes in an attic. Finally, his mother Rivka Bastien (played by Jeanne Moreau)

SEXUAL MCCARTHYISM IS REVISITED INDOUBT Rumors about homosexual conduct destroyed careers following investigations of academic institutions and public schools in Florida from 1959-1964. The same hysteria is portrayed in Doubt, which John Patrick Shanley directs based on his stageplay. When the film begins, Father Brendan Flynn (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) is delivering a sermon

THE READER DEMONSTRATES THE BANALITY OF EVIL AS WELL AS JUSTICE Fifteen-year-old Michael Berg (played by heartthrob David Kross), suddenly afflicted by scarlet fever one day in 1958, is assisted home by thirty-six-year-old Hannah Schmitz (played by Kate Winslet), a collector of fares on a tram in Berlin (though much filming also takes place in

AUSTRALIA APOLOGIZES TO ITS NATIVE POPULATION WITH SIMPLISTIC MELODRAMA Titles at the beginning and of Australia frame the film as an apology to the aboriginal population, which until 1973 lived under an assimilationist policy that for many years kidnapped the young to live with whites, creating what has been called the “stolen generation.” The government

Half the eligible voters in the United States do not vote. Swing Vote tries to explain why by focusing on Bud Johnson (played by Kevin Costner), whose lone vote is supposed to decide the outcome of a presidential election. The improbable premise is that his precocious, idealist school-age daughter Molly (played by Madeline Carroll) secretly cast a

Uncivil Liberties, directed and written by Tom Mercer, is an independent film with very limited release thus. The movie seeks to establish the premise that the Patriot Act of 2001 has resulted both in totalitarian surveillance and guerrilla resistance. Cynthia Porter (played by Penny Perkins) receives the most attention as the developer of an electronic

After a payoff to an American border agent, a truckload of illegals enter New York, including Pedro (played by Jorge Adrián Espindola) and Juan (played by Armando Hernandez), who are attractive seventeen-year-olds. During the trip, Pedro falls asleep, Juan steals his knapsack, and in Brooklyn assumes his identity as the long-lost son of Diego (played