Based on the novel by the prolific Donald E. Westlake, What’s the Worst That Could Happen? is a wild comedy directed by Sam Weisman. A pugnacious Boston millionaire, Max Fairbanks (played by Danny DeVito), is having cashflow problems. He decides, on sound financial advice, to sell off some of his holdings. Although cautioned that the action […]

Jackie Chan has become one of the most delightful actors of all time, enjoyed by filmviewers around the world for his warm smile, fantastic stunts, and boyish charm. That Rush Hour 2, directed by Brett Ratner, even has a plot is beside the point for most young cinema patrons, who can hardly wait for the hilarious

While Parisian émigré Tran Anh Hung filmed Cyclo (1996), a surreal story about the dispossessed in Saigon, he visited Hanoi for the first time. After the Vietnamese government banned his 1996 film Cyclo, he decided to redeem himself with Vertical Ray of the Sun (À La Verticale de l’Été), a tale of three sisters and their relationship problems in

The Road Home (Wo de fu qin mu qin), a film from China based on a novel by Bao Shi, refers to a dirt road from a town to Sanhetun, a mountain village in North China. At the beginning of the movie thirtysomething Luo Changyu (played by Zheng Hao) visits his mother (taking the same

The “Chris Rock Show,” which started on HBO in 1997, has featured a character named Pootie Tang (played by Lance Crouthier), whose speech is in a patois that is unintelligible. Not just two or three odd phrases, as in The Lion King (1994). All Pootie Tang’s speech is in a pseudo-Swahili tongue Tang. Lance Crouthier, who plays

What would happen if you placed an ad in a Personals column, indicating that you were looking for a suitable marriage partner? Why would you do so? These two questions are both posed but answered in that order in The Personals (Zheng hun qi shi), a Taiwanese film directed and cowritten by Chen Kuo-fu, based on

When The Pledge begins, a nine-year-old girl is brutally killed during the winter in the snow-filled mountains near Reno. Detective Jerry Black (played by Jack Nicolson) of the Monash County police goes to the scene of the crime and collects evidence, learning that similar cases twice occurred in the last eight years. In doing so,

Pearl Buck, America’s most famous missionary, lived in China from her childhood to the age of 32. During the next fifty years of her life, she wrote more than eighty-five books, receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938, though her books were banned in China until 1994 because she once criticized the acting ability

Half of all marriages today end in divorce. In Pants on Fire, directed by Rocky Collins, that statistic is maintained. When the film begins, Assistant District Attorney Max Hammer (played by Harry O’Reilly) is married to Julie Hammer (played by Christy Baron), an elementary schoolteacher, and Barry Grogan (played by Neil Maffin), a fellow teacher at

Creative geniuses are often tortured by obsessive impulses. No greater   example can be found in the life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who is at the center of Pandaemonium, a BBC film directed by Julien Temple. When the film begins, we see Coleridge (played by Linus Roache) entering a reception for poets, collapsing on the floor, then