With TSOTSI, Gavin Hood has taken the liberty of updating the timeframe of South African writer Athol Fugard’s only novel. In doing so, the politics of apartheid that spurred the story in the book has given way to the tragedy of AIDS. Changing the circumstances of its title character’s orphaning, though, doesn’t affect the nature of… Read More »
AKEELAH AND THE BEE
What AKEELAH AND THE BEE offers is a sweet, unpretentious, and positive affirmation in the very best sense of that phrase. While the specifics are the struggles of a kid from the ‘hood to make it to the national spelling bee, at heart, and it has a lot of heart, it’s about learning to be… Read More »
UNITED 93
UNITED 93 begins and ends with prayers in Arabic. Those are offered by the terrorists who seized the plane. There are prayers throughout the film as well, some offered in English and all mouthed in wonder, or in terror, or in fear, or in anger. Writer and director Paul Greengrass has kept politics, at least… Read More »
WATER
It is worth noting that during Deepa Mehta’s first attempt to produce WATER, the third in her elements trilogy, the sets were burned and she herself went up in flames. At least in effigy. What is it, one might rightly wonder, about a fictional story set in the 1930s concerning the cloistering of widows that,… Read More »
MUNICH — DVD
There is no commentary track on the DVD release of MUNICH. There is, instead, an introduction by Steven Spielberg, which is more a making-of piece than a talking head, though there is that, too. He talks about Vengance by George Jonas, the book on which he based his film, the only credible account of what… Read More »
IN THE BEDROOM
Don’t jump to any conclusions in the first 15 minutes or so of IN THE BEDROOM about where it’s heading. Though the acting is all very fine and the direction skillful, you might thing that you have pretty much figured out everything that’s going to happen after the first 10 minutes or so. And then… Read More »
BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN DVD
There has never been a film more heartbreaking, more beautiful, and more unforgettable than BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN. The tale of two cowboys (Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal) who unexpectedly fall in love in a time, the 1960s, place, the American west, as part of an economic class, working class, where such a thing is just not… Read More »
WORLD TRADE CENTER
In this offering from the fecund imagination of Oliver Stone there is no hyperbole, no bombast, and no vast paranoid conspiracy. Instead, with World Trade Center, he has turned his considerable gifts, and using actual events, to recreate what it was like to be at Ground Zero, literally and figuratively, on the day that everything… Read More »
QUINCEANERA
The QUINCEANERA is a coming-of-age celebration for Mexican girls in which they take the step from childhood to adulthood, a step from which there is no turning back. As observed today, there is painstaking attention to the rituals, but the underlying meaning as often as not, gets lost in the materialism of expensive clothes and… Read More »
THE ILLUSIONIST
Click here to listen to the interview with Neil Burger (15:34). A man in shirtsleeves sitting in intense concentration on a bare stage. The audience watching in rapt silence. Police lining the aisles ready to act. Thus begins THE ILLUSIONIST, a tale of sleight-of-hand, misdirection, and magic in many senses of the word. The only… Read More »
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