The Nazi horrors have spawned many heroic true stories. The Pianist, directed by Roman Polanski, is one such tale of survival in the face of adversity. When the film begins and ends, Wladyslaw Szpilman (played by Adrien Brody) is playing the piano for a Polish radio station. Midway through the performance, bombs explode, the broadcast is […]

The Other Side of Heaven brings to the screen the true story of John Groberg, a Mormon missionary to Tonga from 1953 to 1956, based on his memoirs. The film follows a “the adventures of” formula, with beautiful scenery, though the movie was actually filmed in the Cook Islands, not Tonga. The film begins in 1953

Outta Time is a low-budget thriller, directed by Lorena David, featuring handsome and muscular Mario Lopez, who plays a college student named David Morales. David is pleasing his mother Gloriana (played by Dyana Ortelli), who lives in Tijuana, because he is close to graduating from college, the first in his family to so. David’s athletic scholarship

The Panic Room is a thriller in which the criminals seek to steal millions of dollars from a safe in a house in New York City recently purchased by Meg Altman (played by Jodie Foster). The house is quite large, with an elevator to get up three stories, and with a special room designed to protect

  Le bossu (given the English title On Guard!), directed by Phillipe de Broca, features swordplay, court intrigue, horses dashing through the French countryside from Nice to Paris, all to the accompaniment of the music of Cavalleria Rusticana and based on an 1857 novel by Paul Féval. The story takes place at the turn of the seventeenth

A cop has been killed, and the cop killer is at large. That is the premise for Narc, directed and written by Joe Carnahan. Henry Oak (played by Ray Liotta) was on duty at the time of the killing, and he claims to know who did the foul deed. Eighteen months earlier, Nick Tellis (played

In 1933, two domestic servants in Le Mans, France, were convicted of brutally murdering their employer and her daughter in a one-day trial. Despite the possibility that they were mentally deranged, no psychiatric defense was allowed. The crime, believed to be the most heinous case of women murdering women in the world, shocked the French

  What motivates a stalker? That question is posed in One Hour Photo, directed and written by Mark Romanek. When the film begins, a timid Seymore (“Sy”) Parrish (played by Robin Williams) is in a police interrogation room. A police officer asks him, “What did you have against the Yorkin family?” Instead of answering, Sy asks

Monsoon Wedding is about a gala wedding in New Delhi. Directed by Mira Nair, the purpose of the story is to show Indian traditions at their finest, with dance, music, and costuming that will impress filmviewers around the world. The story involves the arrival and participation of members of an extended family in the days prior

  Politicians, according to political scientist Harold Lasswell, solve personal problems in choosing their occupation. In Murder by Numbers, directed by Barbet Schroeder, the same thesis is applied to police, albeit in a subplot of the story. Police officer Cassie Mayweather (played by Sandra Bullock) was terrorized as a teenager by her abusive husband, who is