When Woman, Thou Art Loosed begins, a young woman pulls out a gun and kills a man during a church service. The woman, Michelle Jordan (played by Kimberly Elise), is a composite of several African American women who are in trouble in and out of prison, according to titles at the end of the film. The purpose […]
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Stage Beauty, directed by Richard Eyre, takes place in the era of Charles II of England (1660-1685). The film is adapted from Jeffrey Hatcher’s play Compleat Female Stage Beauty. When the film begins, only men can act in stageplays by law, so men alone play the part of females. The royal decree is of considerable
Stereotypically, macho Latin lovers enjoy sex partners as conquests whom they can gradually dominate to a point where they lose interest in the weaker partner; jealous of adversaries, they can take extreme measures to assert control, though they will eventually drop their conquests in a state of psychological disarray. Testosterone depicts a love-obsessed Anglo American who
Straight-Jacket is directed by Richard Day, the author of the stage play of the same title. Similar to Far From Heaven (2002), a major premise of the film is that gays were very much in the closet during the 1950s. Movie star Guy Stone (played by Matt Letscher), who lives in a magnificent estate with a sweeping view
Transfixed, also known as Gender Bias, is a Belgian film entitled Mauvais Genres about transvestites and the transgendered, their admirers and those who hate them. Based on a novel by Brigitte Aubert and directed by Francis Girod, the movie focuses most attention on Bo Ancelin (played by Robinson Stèvenin), a night club entertainer in Brussels who began dressing
Films directed by Ken Loach tend to focus on problems of ordinary people, often immigrants, who are trapped by the system. Loach’s latest, Ae Fond Kiss, deals with various forms of prejudice that try to keep two lovers apart, a variant on the Romeo & Juliet paradigm. When the film begins, Casim Khan (played by Atta
Alexander, directed by Oliver Stone, is told in the form of a narrative from Ptolemy (played by Anthony Hopkins), the ruler of Egypt, dictated to a scribe in 323 b.c. He recounts a biography of Alexander (played by Colin Farrell) from childhood to his death at the age of thirty-two. The point of the biography
Bear Cub (Cachorro), directed by Luis Miguel Albaladejo, is about the life of Bernardo (played by David Castillo), whose libertine mother Violeta (Elvira Lindo) decides to go on a two-week tour of India with her second husband. Before leaving, she assigns nine-year-old Bernardo to the care of her brother, Pedro (played by José Luis García-Pérez),
Bad Education (La Mala educación), directed by Pedro Almodóvar and based on a short story that he wrote in the early 1970s, explores the limits of love and sexual passion. The film begins, captioned 1980, with a gratuitous scene, presumably calculated to scare straights out of the audience so that gays and their friends will
The Azerbaijan homeland stretches from an area in the Caucasus into present-day Iran; the principal city, Baku, is an oil-rich metropolis on the Caspian Sea that is featured in Broken Bridges, directed by Rafigh Pooya. Azerbaijan was integrated into Imperial Russia in 1828. When the Russian revolution began in 1917, Azerbaijan set up an independent state,