Ocean’s 11 is a remake of Ocean’s Eleven (1960), with George Clooney playing Danny Ocean rather than Frank Sinatra. When the film begins, Danny is discharged from a New Jersey with two goals in mind — to pull the biggest heist ever and to regain the affections of his estranged spouse Tess (played by Julia Roberts). After reconnecting […]

O, based on Shakespeare’s Othello with some passages from the Verdi opera, takes place in Palmetto Grove Academy, a prep school in Charleston, South Carolina. The Othello is African American Odin James (played by Mekhi Phifer), a star basketball player on scholarship who has attracted the romantic attentions of an upper-class Desdemona named Desi Brable

No Man’s Land, directed and written by Danis Tanovich, tries to dramatize the absurdity of the current UN-enforced peace in Bosnia. Chiki (played by Branko Djurich) is a Bosnian, and Nino (played by Rene Bitorajac) is a Serb during the Bosnia War in 1993. When the fog lifts one morning, a few Serbs successfully attack

No One Sleeps, written, directed, and produced by Jochen Hick, focuses on a theory regarding the origin of the HIV virus. Although most medical authorities believe that the HIV virus was originally found within monkeys in Africa and then transmitted by human contact, the link between monkey-handlers in Africa and the first diagnosed cases among

Imagine a film based on a dramatic reading of Allen Ginsberg’s 1955 poem Howl. Now imagine an update of Ginsberg’s reading of Howl for gays in the last third of the twentieth century (out-of-the-closet Ginsberg died in 1997) and you have an understanding of the favorable reception of the film The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me, which

When Michael Moore embarked on a documentary about the closing of the General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan, his quest became a live drama on film in Roger & Me (1990). Similarly, Christian Bauer decided in 2000 to film his investigation of the disappearance of Allen Ross, his collaborator in seven documentaries over as many years, and

The Green Mile (1999) culminates with an electrocution of a sweet African American that went awry, dramatizing an actual incident involving the electric chair in Florida. Soon after the film came out, the use of the electric chair was banned in Florida. In the beginning of Monster’s Ball, the slang name for the electrocution, we see the

Mistitled, The Man Who Cried is about a woman and two men who cry at three poignant moments in the film, which already impressed European audiences as Les larmes d’un homme before cautiously opening at a few cinemas in Los Angeles. At the center of the story is Fegele (played as a child by Claudia

The title of the noir film L.I.E. stands for Long Island Expressway, but the story is about the etiology of prostitution among white male teenagers, a variation on the theme of The Ice Storm (1997) and similar critiques of the emptiness of a sterile suburbia of affluent homes. Howie Blitzer (played by Paul Franklin Dano) is a skinny

Based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s three-volume classic, director Peter Jackson has brought the first of the three volumes to the screen under the title The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, with the next two films to be released in 2002 and 2003. A fourteenth century hobbit named Bilbo Baggins (played by Ian Holm)