Before Night Falls
In Before Night Falls, Julian Schnabel (Basquiat) has inventively adapted the memoirs of gay Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas into a beautiful film.
Cecil B Demented
Cecil B Demented makes terrorist cinema. And that's exactly what John Waters does through his main character's film in the film.
The Cell
Though The Cell has a conventional framework in terms of the "serial killer" genre to which it belongs, it is only to reinforce the importance of the psychological scenes that use surrealism.
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Hong Kong martial arts, romance, magic, and drama combine to make a wonderful film. Ang Lee (The Ice Storm and Sense And Sensibility) has probably created the first Mandarin kung fu film that American girls can enjoy with their male counterparts.
Gladiator
Majestic and psychological, Gladiator marks the return of a director and a genre to the big screen. By breathing new life to a deposed genre, he is able to revive the flame of his fiery debut and at the same time create a new movie hero onscreen: a gladiator, and in the flesh: Russell Crowe.
Goya In Bordeaux
Carlos Saura’s (Tango, Ay Carmela, Blood Wedding) latest endeavor brings the life and art of whom Andre Malraux considered the world’s first modern painter onto the screen: Francisco de Goya (1746-1828). Saura’s eye for art and humanity (as well as celebrating his love of Spanish arts) brings the full emotional force of Goya’s passion and witness to war and history onto the screen.
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
The Coen Brothers’ latest effort is one hell of a joyride down bumpy and dusty rural Mississippi roads in the 1930’s. You can’t go wrong with George Clooney and John Turturro as your guides.
Quills
With such a fiery subject, the Marquis De Sade, it would have been easy to make of Quills a voyeuristic, gratouitously shocking film, or on the contrary, a puritanical and condemning lampoon. Philip Kaufman (Unbearable Lightness of Being) avoids the trap of the tendency in order to compose a gorgeous ode to the freedom of expression.
Requiem for a Dream Requiem for a Dream takes a raw look at the lives of four addicts and how their addictions fuel their own delusion as well as the depths to which they will degrade themselves to realize the unattainable. From the director of Pi.
Shadow of the Vampire
Beyond the obvious tribute to Nosferatu, Shadow Of The Vampire is an ironic reflection on the occupation of the filmmaker.
Traffic
With Traffic, Steven Soderbergh draws up a cruel report of the inefficiency of the war on drugs. The director (The Limey, Erin Brockovich, Out Of Sight) builds his film around four stories located in three quite distinct but not so distant worlds.
Film Picks
