Long Time Dead is a British horror film. As credits roll, 1979 and Morocco are identified as the time and place for mysterious events involving a Ouija board. The film begins with a group of mixed twentysomething youth, who are hanging out together in a London apartment. Soon, they go to a disco and get bored […]
The Lonely Affair of the Heart, directed by Junichi Suzuki, is filmed mostly in black and white to reflect the boredom and unhappiness of Orie (played by Rumi Sakakibara), a woman in her forties who married her sister’s husband after her sister died. Shiraki (played by Masakane Yonekura), her sixty-four-year-old husband, has given her a
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Every year Hollywood offers a back-to-school film, and for 2002 the scary offering is Swimfan, directed by John Polson. Ben Cronin (played by Jesse Bradford) is a senior at a high school in New Jersey (though the filming is on Long Island); he is a top swimmer. Coach Simkins (played by Dan Hedaya) tells him
The United States is all about money, not the quality of life, opines Puerto Rican immigrant Victor Rosa (played by John Leguizamo) in an early voiceover monologue as the film Empire begins. Whereas many American films glorify lawbreakers, notably Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and The Sting (1973), those involving drugs are often filled with degradation and violence, and Empire is no exception.
Like father, like son? Do genetics predestine us or do we have a choice? City by the Sea, based on a true story recounted in a 1997 Esquire article written by Michael McAlary, asks both questions. The first is answered more or less in the affirmative, the second by taking the side of free will. To do
Die Another Day, the twentieth James Bond film in forty years, is directed by Lee Tamahori and has extraordinary special effects, keeping everyone awake from possible slumber during the boring parts. James Bond (played by Pierce Brosnan) is sent by M16 to North Korea to track down a diamond smuggling operation. When he arrives, Zao
When a close long-term relationship ends in the death of one partner, the survivor will understandably grieve even after the memorial service, which is supposed to bring closure in ordinary circumstances. In Dragonfly, Dr. Joe Darrow (played by Kevin Costner) is an emergency room physician at Chicago Memorial Hospital whose wife Dr. Emily Darrow (played
The Iranian film Daughters of the Sun (Dakhtaran-e Khorshid), directed by Maryam Shahriar, pictures the poverty of the rural countryside, where desperate families send their illiterate daughters to a small-scale rug factory in order to gain remittances from their wages while they live in virtual slavery. They are cruelly punished for accidents rather than treated
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The Emperor’s Club affords us an opportunity to revisit a New England prep school to learn a different lesson from The Dead Poets Society (1989), where we caught a glimpse of what a Jewish boy had to endure during the 1950s. The Emperor’s Club, directed by Michael Hoffman and based on The Palace Thief (1995) by Ethan Canin, focuses on the
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Enough, directed by Michael Apted, presents a textbook example of male chauvinism. Since there have been many such films before, Enough hints at the unique element of the story by casting Jennifer Lopez in the lead role. “Slim” (played by Jennifer Lopez), a humble waitress in a Los Angeles restaurant, is the prey for Mitch (played by