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Damaged Care, directed by Harry Winer, is a docudrama about the unsavory health maintenance organization (HMO) industry, which began through Congressional legislation in 1973. One day, Dr. Linda Peeno (played by Laura Dern) is hired by profitmaking Humana Health Care in Louisville, Kentucky, to approve requests from physicians for extraordinary expenditures on behalf of patients. […]

  Titles at the beginning of Dahmer tell filmviewers that the infamous Milwaukee serial killer was convicted in 1992 of more than a dozen counts of murdering young men. When the film begins, Jeffrey Dahmer (played by Jeremy Renner) is on his way home from work at a chocolate factory when he spots Khamtay, a good-looking Laotian

To the haunting and sentimental music of Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky, Michael Cacoyannis has directed a masterful cinematic production of Anton Chekhov’s 1904 play The Cherry Orchard. The plot is much less complicated than the character studies, so the cinematic version is particularly impressive due to fine acting, costuming, and magnificent sets. Checkov’s aim was to demonstrate

When The Crime of Father Amaro (El Crimen de Padre Amaro) begins, a handsome, twenty-four-year-old priest is taking a busride to his new pastoral assignment in Los Reyes, a mythical Mexican town. The bus is robbed en route, but he gives a wad of cash to his seatmate as he exits, thus establishing him as a generous,

The plight of the aboriginal peoples of North America is scarcely visible to most Americans. Few go to reservations, except to gamble, and Native Americans seem invisible off the reservation. One visible Native American, who has met the president of the United States and the pope, is Seymour Polatkin. The Business of Fancydancing, directed by Sherman

There are now three cinematic versions of Stephen King’s first novel, Carrie (1974), each with a different slant on the telekinetic high schooler who wreaks havoc. The first, called Carrie (1976), directed by Brian De Palma, followed the story fairly carefully. Katt Shea directed The Rage: Carrie II (1999), which is based in part on a true story about Lakewood High

Some 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry were relocated from the West Coast to internment camps during World War II, an event recorded on a Movietown newsreel from 1942 that prefaces the recent film Buddha Heads. Although such movies as Come See the Paradise (1990) have depicted events about one of the saddest violations of constitutional rights in American

Titles at the beginning the film Bartleby tell filmviewers about the strange life of Herman Melville, who was born in 1819, achieved fame by writing adventure stories, and then lost favor with the publication of his novel Moby Dick (1851), and his literary genius was also unrecognized in Bartleby: The Scrivener (1856). Since he could not earn money as a writer,

Whereas the CIA is supposed to have abandoned assassination as a tool of statecraft in the late 1970s, George W. Bush and his cohorts keep railing about toppling Saddam Hussein and hoping that Osama bin Laden is dead somewhere. What excellent timing for the cinematic release of The Bourne Identity, a story about an “invisible” CIA

  Barbershops have long been sanctuaries for men to express opinions to one another on any subject. The film Barbershop, directed by Tim Story, reproduces that environment as well as serving up a slice of life among African Americans of three generations. The plot is simple. Calvin Palmer (played by Ice Cube) is the owner of