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

  “Guys just gotta have fun” is the final line, a posthumous and doubtless apocryphal voiceover of Bob Crane (played by Greg Kinnear) in the biopic Auto Focus, directed by Paul Schrader. Based on the book The Murder of Bob Crane by Robert Graysmith, the film is about the rise and fall of a talented actor from Connecticut

Bad Company, directed by Joel Schumacher, is the third recent film, after The Peacekeeper (1997) and this year’s The Sum of All Fears, to feature a nuclear suitcase bomb of Russian origin on the loose. One day Jake Hayes (played by squeaky-voiced Chris Rock) is captured in Jersey City by CIA operatives led by Gaylord Oakes (played by

  Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner) is a Canadian film featuring the Inuits of the Arctic Circle. Featuring a mythic story, handed down through oral tradition over the generations, Atanarjuat is primarily of anthropological interest. Most of the 172 minutes of film footage deals with how a small indigenous population manages to stay alive in Igloolik, Nunavut Territory, perhaps

In Amy’s Orgasm, directed by Julie Davis, Amy Mandell had a disappointing love affair, wrote a book with advice to women in the same boat, entitled “Why Love Doesn’t Work,” and is sought after by talk show hosts. Although her thesis is that women do not need men to be fulfilled, one talk show host, sexist

American Girl, directed by Jordan Brady, is presumably an answer to American Beauty (1999). Whereas American Beauty portrays the boredom of antiseptic middle class suburban life, American Girl is about a dysfunctional family among poor whites. Big John Grubb (played by Chris Mulkey), who killed two men during a fight, is serving a life sentence at Pendleton State Prison.

The Accidental Spy (Dak miu mai shing) directed by Jackie Chan, again has the amiable kungfu artist leaping from tall buildings and crashing through open markets in endless chase scenes, with the eye candy of his nude body (rear but not pubic) on display for several minutes. The story is, as always, incidental, but the cinematography

Those who saw the film Enigma last year may have asked whether the Germans changed their codes when an Enigma machine was found missing. Presumably to answer that question, we now have All the Queen’s Men, directed by Sefan Ruzowitsky. At the beginning of the film, titles tell us that Puff Platoons, composed of men dressed as women,