THE ALAMO PROVIDES A PARADIGM FOR RETALIATION AGAINST TERRORISM After 9/11, George Bush encouraged members of the film industry to depict subjects that might deal with how Americans might respond to internal threats. The Alamo, directed by Texasphile John Lee Hancock, appears to be one such project, a contemporary remake of the 1960 John Wayne […]

THE DESPERATION OF IRANIANS PORTRAYED IN CRIMSON GOLD How can a filmmaker suggest the need for reform by making a movie in a repressive regime that has failed to live up to promises to bring about a better life? Crimson Gold (Talaye sorkh) has found a way to do so–by recreating a true story, using

The film Proteus is about two men who enjoy each other’s bodily pleasures on Robben Island, South Africa, so the title may at first seem inappropriate. According to a title at the beginning of the film, the proteus was proposed as South Africa’s national flower in 1964; a title at the end informs us that in the

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

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