Uncategorized

Apocalypto, directed by Mel Gibson, is an epic story about the Mayan people. After establishing several Mayans as delightfully innocent savages, the film shows how they are captured by the brutally savage Aztecs. When the film ends, in 1519, Spanish ships have docked on the coast, and the Mayan survivors of the Aztec imperialists decide […]

POCAHONTAS DISCOVERS A MOST PECULIAR ENGLAND IN THE NEW WORLD The New World, directed by Terrence Malick, should perhaps have been named “The Pocahontas Story,” as the film focuses mostly on her life from 1607, when the 12-year-old Native American princess first encounters 27-year-old Captain John Smith (played by Colin Farrell), until her death in

Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, directed by Albert Brooks, is for American audiences but may not play well in the Muslim World. The ridiculous plot is simple enough to carry many laughs. An out-of-work comedian, Albert Brooks (playing himself), is summoned to Washington by Fred Thompson (playing himself). Thompson, former Senator but now

In Last Holiday, directed by Wayne Wang, a kitchen salesperson at Kragen Department Store in New Orleans, Georgia Byrd (played by Queen Latifa), is diagnosed with a terminal illness. She has three weeks to live, according to her physician. The film is a retake of a 1950 classic film with Alec Guinness (as George Bird) that

  The Romeo and Juliet paradigm frames La Petite Jérusalem, a French film directed by Karin Albou. Laura (played by Fanny Valette) was brought to a Paris suburb from Tunisia by her widowed mother (played by Sonia Tahar) some years ago. She is studying philosophy at a university in Paris and finds Kantian wisdom to be

Copying Beethoven, directed by Agnieszka Holland, is a biopic of Ludwig Van Beethoven (played by Ed Harris) that is premised on a fictional Anna Holtz (played by Diane Kruger), though based on actual persons, as his assistant from the completion of the Ninth Symphony until his death. After a prologue in which Anna cries on

Ceasefire (Atash bas) is an Iranian film about a conflict between a traditional male married to a liberated woman. Director Tahmineh Milani has dealt with the same theme in several previous movies, notably The Hidden Half, which garnered a Political Film Society nomination for best film on human rights in 2001. However, in Ceasefire she decides

  Sunflower (Xiang ri kui), directed by Zhang Yang, is a semiautobiographical social history of China from the era of Chairman Mao to the present through the lives of a simple family, notably the only son Zhang Xiangyang, who was born in 1967, his father Gengian (played by Sun Haiying), and mother Xiuqing (played by

OIL IS TOO IMPORTANT TO BE LEFT TO HONEST CAPITALISTS IN SYRIANA Syriana, directed and written by Stephen Gaghan, is suggested by the book See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA’s War on Terrorism (2002), written by former CIA field officer Robert Baer. The film attempts to portray how

In 1971, when the Cultural Revolution was in full swing, two teenagers in Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (Balzac et la petite tailleuse chinoise) are sentenced to reeducation for four years in Mount Phoenix, a remote area in Sichuan of breathtaking beauty, because of the “bourgeois crimes” of their fathers. Luo (played by Kun