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The Korean film Oldboy, directed by Park Chan-Wook, is an exploration into revenge and extreme sadism based in part on a Japanese comic book. There are many confusing flashbacks and flashforwards, but the origin of the plot evidently begins when Oh Dae-Su (played by Choi Min-Sik) and Lee Woo-Jin (played by Yu Ji-Tae) are students at […]

Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, directed by Dan Ireland, a movie about a lovable elderly widow, is based on a 1971 novel by Elizabeth Taylor (not the actress), though the story in the film is set in the present. Arthur, the husband of septuagenarian Mrs. Sarah Palfrey (played by Dame Joan Plowright), has recently died.

In Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), a wheelchair-bound apartment dweller sees a homicide through binoculars in an apartment across the way and is eventually terrorized by the murderer. In a fascinating variation on that theme, Marcos Bernstein directs The Other Side of the Street (O Outro Lado da Rua), about a murder in Rio de Janeiro spotted in

Breakfast on Pluto, directed by Neil Jordan, is an adventure tale of Patrick Braden (played as a child by Conor McEvoy, as a teenager by Cillian Murphy), a woman who is trapped in a man’s body and crossdresses from an early age. The story, which is a retake of The Butcher Boy (1998), has thirty-six captioned segments,

The Interpreter, directed by Sydney Pollack, focuses on an alleged attempt to assassinate Dr. Edmund Zuwanie (played by Earl Cameron), for twenty-eight years the president of Matobo, a fictional South African country. During most of the movie, he is en route to New York, where he is scheduled to deliver a speech to the General

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, directed by Andrew Adamson, is based on the 1950 book by the prolific Englishman C. S. Lewis (1898-1963). Although basically a children’s story, the hidden agendas are many. When the film begins, German bombers knock out homes throughout London during World War II, resulting

Charles Dickens wrote Oliver Twist to demonstrate that the industrial revolution was producing orphan children while parents were being worked to death in factories, such that unsavory characters recruited the orphans to a life of petty theft in which they had discipline, room, board, companionship, and gin. The film Twist, directed and written by Jacob Tierney, cleverly attempts

When White Noise begins, a title indicates that Thomas Edison suggested in 1928 that the dead might communicate with the living by means of radio waves. A second title notes that such communications, known as the electronic voice phenomenon (EVP), have been observed from 1939 and that the phenomenon is increasingly being studied seriously. At the end,

  3-Iron, directed by Kim Ki-Duk, ends with a title proclaiming that sometimes reality and fantasy are indistinguishable. The film’s title refers to one of the clubs used in golf that plays a significant role in the film. Tae-Suk (played by Jae Hee), a college student with a motorcycle, evidently has nothing to do during

5×2: Cinq Fois Deux, directed by François Ozon, is a character study in which filmviewers are challenged to infer the reason for the divorce between Gilles (played by Stéphane Freiss) and Marion (played by Valérie Bruni-Tedeschi) after a marriage from 1999-2003. More subliminally, the perils of bisexuality are exposed in a five-act story that is