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Based on the novel of the same title by Gene Brewer, the film K-PAX is a psychological thriller directed by Iain Softley. All of a sudden in the middle of Grand Central Station, a man appears from nowhere. Seeing a woman whose handbag is being taken from her, he goes to help her. When police arrive, they […]

Bisexuality is not well understood in cultures that are accustomed to either/or categorizations of human sexuality. Now, the Spanish film I Will Survive (Sobreviveré), directed by Alfonso Albacete and David Menkes, joins the 1999 French film The School of Flesh (L’Ecole de la Chair) in presenting a male lead actor who plays both sides of the fence without apology. When I

Jeepers Creepers, which is supposed to be a horror film, gets its title from a 1930s song. The only things frightening about the movie, however, are a few musical thud sounds, which fail to rescue a plot that director Victor Salva wrote after he viewed The Blair Witch Project (1999) and The Sixth Sense (1999) and then recalled hearing

  Can a gay and a straight man work side by side productively and even help each other in amorous pursuits? In Hit and Runway, directed by Christopher Livingston, an aspiring girlchasing Italian-American screenwriter, Alex Andero (played by Michael Parducci) is enrolled in a course to learn how to write films; his cousin Norman Rizzoli (played

If you saw The Saltmen of Tibet, a 1997 German documentary, you will not be surprised by the rugged life of Tibetans portrayed in Himalaya, a French film subtitled L’enfance d’un chef (The Infancy of a Chief); the film is known as Caravan in Canada. The director is Eric Valli, who lived in the region for several years, assisted

Hearts in Atlantis is based on two short stories from a collection of the same title by Stephen King. The plot is a familiar one: A stranger comes into a small New England town, and unusual events transpire. Whereas The Stranger (1946) featured a fascist after World War II, Hearts in Atlantis, directed by Scott Hicks, gives only obscure

The world gets another opportunity to see how women are treated in a strict Moslem country in Hemlock (Shokaran), directed by Behrooz Afkhami. The country is Iran. Women had some freedoms before the revolution of 1979, when Ayatollah rule began, so the film is yet another example of the recent pressure for liberalization. Afkhami, in fact, has

Can a man write an Ann Landers or Dear Abby column with sensitivity and panache? When the film Good Advice begins, stockbroker Ryan Turner (played by Charlie Sheen) provides stock tips to clients around the world, but the advice is so bad that his boss fires him. Subsequently, he is investigated for insider trading; although he is not indicted, he loses

    Thanks to a revision of the U.S. copyright law, novels of the Gilded Age become part of public domain fifty years after the death of the writer. Accordingly, a surge can be observed in cinemas today. The Golden Bowl, the latest contribution, is based on the 1904 novel of the same title by Henry

Glamour, directed and written by Frigyes Gödros, portrays three generations of a Hungarian Jewish family, so comparisons with last year’s Sunshine are inevitable. The film consists of episodes, often quite unpleasant and slow-moving, but the common thread is how the family survived the twentieth century. When the film begins, a family is at seder dinner, and the