THE IMMIGRANT CRISIS BOILS OVER IN CROSSING OVER Immigration problems in the United States appear insoluble in Crossing Over, directed by Wayne Kramer, who has expanded his 1996 short film of the same title into a full-length drama.  Rather than focusing on political options on a grand scale, the film features a variety of dilemmas […]

POLANSKI, UNAUTHORIZED TRIES TO EXPLAIN WHY THE DIRECTOR WENT OFF THE DEEP END From 1978, Roman Polanski has lived mostly in Paris, where he escaped to avoid a court order for a psychiatric evaluation before a trial to defend himself against several crimes. A sympathetic biopic, Polanski, Unauthorized, tries to explain his complex personality, including

TEACHERS LEARN FROM STUDENTS IN THE CLASS A French film, The Class (Entre les murs) seeks to portray the difficulties of instructing early teenage immigrant students in a Paris middle school. Based on the book by the director, Laurent Cantet, the main focus is on French language instructor François Marin (played by François Begaudeau) and

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