Saved!, directed by Brian Dannelly, follows in the footsteps of Mean Girls in presenting a high school queen bee who tries to control everyone but cracks up when unsuccessful. Whereas Mean Girls takes place in suburban Evanston, Illinois, Saved! is located in a Maryland suburb (though filmed in Vancouver). The protagonists attend American Eagle Christian High, a private school, presumably where […]

Secuestro Express ends with a title that says, “Half the world is hungry, the other half obese. There are two options. Kill the monster or invite him to dinner.” A Venezuelan film, directed by Jonathan Jakubowicz, the thesis is driven home by action that focuses on a “kidnapping express” gang. One late evening, betrothed Carla (played

September Tapes, directed by Christian Johnston, was shot in Afghanistan during July 2002. A handheld camera, supposedly discovered by Johnston, has eight tapes; they are screened as Tape 1, Tape 2, and so forth. At the center of the film is Don Larson (played by George Calil), who has the painful experience of hearing his

Spanglish, directed by Jim Brooks, is a tragicomedy about problems of assimilation of Mexican Americans in the United States. Although the word Spanglish refers to the tendency of recent immigrants to converse in sentences with words from both languages, the film is about cultural contradictions, not language. Indeed, hardly any Spanglish is spoken. The film

Suspect Zero, directed by E. Elias Merhige, is an implausible mystery story within a mystery story–a serial killer who is killing serial killers while the FBI dithers due to its own procedural imperatives. When the film begins, Benjamin O’Ryan (played by Ben Kingsley) suddenly appears across the table from traveling salesman Harold Speck (played by

During World War II, Japanese living on the West Coast of the United States were forced to live in internment camps, so great was the fear that they would commit acts of sabotage. Yet Japanese living in Hawai`i were not relocated, primarily because the economy of the Islands would have been mortally wounded; Japanese then

The Fighting Temptations is about a Gospel music group, and the name simply means that good Christians must fight the temptations of life. Thus, the film is not about a music group known as The Temptations, though some might even say that The Fighting Temptations is better than The Temptations. Indeed, audiences will move their heads and bodies

TRADITIONAL JAPANESE CULTURE WINS THE BATTLE IN THE LAST SAMURAI The Last Samurai, directed by Edward Zwick, provides a deep immersion into traditional Japanese culture that could be called “Lawrence of Japan” or “Dances with Samurai,” thus joining the genre of the 1935 (and 1962) and 1990 films, respectively. The story is fictional, recasting actual