Millions, a British film directed by Danny Boyle, is a Christmas fable based on the premise that the Bank of England will have to burn a certain quantity of paper money before the conversion to the Euro currency. When the movie begins, the family of Ronnie Cunningham (played by James Nesbitt) is moving from a […]

Mrs. Henderson Presents, directed by Stephen Frears, is a biopic about Laura Henderson (played by Judi Dench), who buys the derelict Windmill Theatre in the Piccadilly section of London after her husband dies, restores the interior, and hires out-of-work Vivian Van Damm (played by Bob Hoskins) to manage a musical review. Indeed, he is hired

That homophobia results in teenage suicide is a dry fact, but My Summer of Love supplies a plot that vividly portrays how such a tragedy might occur. Directed by Pawel Pawlikowski and based on the novel by Helen Cross, the film focuses on love between middle class sixteen-year-old Tamsin (played by Emily Blunt) and slightly younger, working

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