Cowboys & Angels, directed by David Gleeson, is a coming-of-age film about twenty-year-old Shane (played by Michael Legge), who leaves his small hometown outside Limerick for the big city, where he hopes to advance his dreams as an artist. Because of the high rents of the city, he ends up sharing a flat with Vincent […]

American films are perhaps unique in glamorizing notorious lawbreakers, thus enabling freeway daredevils, unscrupulous lawyers, and white-collar embezzlers to feel that they are part of a respected tradition. No criminals are more revered than “con men,” from The Sting (1973) to Catch Me If You Can (2002). Although the film Confidence, directed by James Foley, tries to find a place

  Historians say that Napoleon Bonaparte died on St. Helena Island in 1821, though the cause of death is still in dispute. Monsieur N., directed by Antoine de Caunes, adds to the mystery by fabricating a tale about his secret escape from exile. The film begins on October 15, 1840, when his remains are received in

  In Loco Love (also known as Mi Casa, Su Casa), Donald Chandler (played by Roy Werner) is divorced and has lost his restaurant. Not realizing his plight, two employees, Miguel (played by Gerardo Mejia) and Tobias (played by Frank Gallegos), come to his house to tell him that they quit because Miguel has won the lottery, a

  Pre-season football practice at Hanna High School in Anderson, South Carolina, might have occurred as usual in 1976 but for the presence of African American James Robert Kennedy (played by Cuba Gooding, Jr.,) at a fence outside the field. When a football goes beyond the fence, James scoops up the pigskin, which ends up

Film footage is often longer in production than in a cinema because cuts have been made to bing the total closer to the conventional ninety minutes. When the editing of action films is extensive, however, the plot suffers from mortal wounds, not just surgical cuts. Thus, Once upon a Time in México, directed by Robert Rodriguez,

  Tony Jaa (the clever screenname of Phanom Yeerum) is hyped as the successor to Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, and Jet Li in publicity for the film Ong-Bak, directed by Prachya Pinkaew. Accordingly, the film is subtitled oxymoronically as The Thai Warrior in some United States screenings. The third in a recent spate of films about Thai country

Nicotina, directed by Hugo Rodríguez, is a dark comedy that deals with ninety minutes of naughty residents and petty criminals during a warm night in México City. Various actors smoke or refrain from smoking, with amusing or often tragic consequences. Starting out as the unconnected stories of five groups of persons, they eventually come together. We

Warriors of Heaven and Earth (Tian di ying xiong), directed by He Ping, is an epic film about an incident in the eighth century along the Silk Route, the principal land route for trade between China and Europe. As the Arabs and the Turks became more powerful in the Middle East, they were able to

On July 1, 1981, William Deverell, Ronald Launius, Joy Miller, and Barbara Richardson were brutally slaughtered at 8763 Wonderland Avenue in the Hollywood Hills, not far from the LA residence of then-governor Jerry Brown. The noir film Wonderland, directed by James Cox, presents alternative but jumbled explanations for the unsolved crime, focusing on the key roles