A “DEAD” PRESIDENT SURVIVES IN VANTAGE POINT When Vantage Point begins, President Ashton (played by William Hurt) is assassinated in a public square in Salamanca, Spain, or so it seems. After a few rewinds of tapes of the event, director Pete Travis appears to promise a Rashomon (1950) whodunit, the film is mostly a few […]
CHINA CENSORS SUMMER PALACE Directed by Lou Ye, Summer Palace (Yihe Yuan) views modern China from the perspective of college students, who are adrift amid the new capitalist society. No longer controlled by family or the state, Hu Hong (played by Lei Hao) leaves her boyfriend Xiao Jun (played by Lin Cui) in Tumen to
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (4 luni, 3 saptamani si 2 zile) is a Romanian noir film directed by Cristian Mungui that is based on a true story about a pregnant college girl, Gabita Dragut (played by Laura Valiliu), and her dormmate, Otilia(played by Anamaria Marinca), in winter 1987. Gabita does not want the
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HONEYDRIPPER DEPICTS NONCONFRONTATIONAL ACCEPTANCE OF RACISM IN 1950s ALABAMA Political Film Society awardwinner John Sayles has directed yet another small-town slice of life, this time Blacks living in rural Alabama during the 1950s, in Honeydripper. The pace is slow, and every word is spoken as if an epigram. Tyrone Purvis (played by Danny Glover) has
THE KITE RUNNER TRAVELS TO AFGHANISTAN & BACK WITH JOY & SADNESS Director Marc Forster has brought Khaled Hosseini’s 2003 novel to the screen with magnificent cinematography (of China, not Afghanistan) and a story spanning the years 1978- 2000 as a fictional biopic of Amir (played by Khaled Abdalla). When the film begins, San Francisco
IRAQ WAR VETERANTS END UP IN BADLAND Directed by Francesco Lucente, Badland begins with a voiceover that indicates that the protagonist Jerry (played by Jamie Draven) has been dishonorably discharged from the Marines after being court-martialed. Today, he has a job, a spouse Nora (played by Vinessa Shaw), and three small children. They live in
NATIONAL TREASURE: BOOK OF SECRETS GOES ASTRAY Ben Gates (played by Nicholas Cage) goes on another treasure hunt, this time for a Native American gold city that turns out to be hidden under Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota. In the second National Treasure film, again in the Indiana Jones mode, John
SOUTHLAND TALES STARTS WITH A FASCINATING PREMISE BUT TRIVIALIZES THE ORWELLIAN MESSAGE Two atomic bombs hit Texas in 2004. America is transformed. More civil liberties are lost by a renewed Patriot Act that is specifically credited to the Republicans. By 2008, those opposed to the new order, in which surveillance is combined with snipers on
LIONS FOR LAMBS FEATURES OSTRICHES, NOT HAWKS AND DOVES Director Robert Redford shortcuts three plots in the anti-Iraq War film Lions for Lambs. The first plot is an interview by dovish reporter Janine Roth (played by Meryl Streep) of hawkish Senator Jasper Irving (played by Tom Cruise), who has summoned Roth to announce a new