Alone in the Dark, directed by Uwe Boll, is primarily for children, as titles at the beginning are read aloud, presumably for the benefit of those with inadequate reading ability. The story is based on the Atari video game of the same name. Titles indicate that a mythical Native American tribe known as the Abkani, […]

Capote, directed by Bennett Miller, is a biography of two persons and a book. The film is based on the biography Capote by Gerald Clarke (1988). The two persons are Truman Capote (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Perry Smith (played by Clifton Collins, Jr.), who, with an accomplice, killed on the night of November 14, 1959,

HellBent, directed and written by thirty-seven-year-old Paul Etheridge-Ouzts, is strangely billed as the “first all-gay slasher film.” Although Hard (1999), an earlier film in the genre, carries a message (indeed, an exposé about the homophobic LAPD), HellBent offers only the narcissism of Caucasian men in their early twenties with fantastic bodies. Whereas Hard has a realistic sex scene, HellBent presents only foreplay. The

THE WOODSMAN SUGGESTS WHY EX-CONS ARE DOOMED TO RETURN TO PRISON When a prisoner is paroled after a twelve-year sentence for child molesting, how can he return to a normal life? That is the question asked in The Woodsman, directed by Nicole Kassell, based on the play by Steven Fechter. Walter (played by Kevin Bacon),

A History of Violence, directed by David Cronenberg, has been hyped as a paradigm of violence in America. Instead, the film could be called “Godfather IV,” that is, a film about a member of the mafia who tries to go straight. But that would deprive filmviewers of a surprise about two-thirds of the way through

The Honeymooners, directed by John Schultz, is a long overdue film version of a television sitcom from the 1950s. However, the 2005 version features two African American couples. When the film begins, in 1999, busdriver Ralph Kramden (played by Cedric the Entertainer) woos and wins waitress Alice (played by Gabrielle Union), promising that one day

The Jacket, directed by John Maybury, brings to the screen a case study of the psychological damage inflicted by combat as well as of the psychological torture involved in improper psychiatric treatment. The film, which jumps back and forth in time, has a central puzzle: Was Jack Starks (played by Adrien Brody) resurrected after his

Hostage, a thriller directed by Florent Emilio Siri, is based on the 2001 book by Robert Crais. In the prologue, Jeff Talley (played by Bruce Willis), a seventeen-year LAPD veteran who has for ten years been the chief SWAT negotiator with gangsters holding hostages, botches a hostage situation and three persons die. Mortified by his

  Filmviewers in China laughed at Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) because the mid-air fight scenes were ridiculously fake, involving wires. Kung Fu Hustle (titled in Chinese Gong Fu), directed by Stephen Chow, may be seen as a satirical riposte, with fight scenes so unrealistic that the laughter is genuine; satires of other films abound in Kung Fu Hustle, though they

  In 1857, an uprising known in many textbooks as the Sepoy Mutiny occurred in Barrackpore, near Calcutta, India. Mangal Pandey: The Rising, directed by Ketan Mehta, is a dramatization of that event, which the film informs us was the first war of Indian independence. Up to 1857, the East India Company operated in India outside