An unknown judge invites a guilty governess and others to a 1930s safari, for justice one by one.
Camp think making a Christie film must be hard, because so seldom does it work. For me, the metric is very simple. We need to be allowed to speculate against multiple impossibilities. Many folks will be exposed for hidden, possibly relevant qualities. What makes Christie work...
A murdered girl is found under a bridge on a remote road and indigenous detective Jay Swan gets the case. Jay finds that no-one is that interested in solving the murder of an indigenous teenager and he is forced to work alone.
Wholeness in What You Sow of us want to be genuinely ourselves, and nearly all of us are at the mercy of societal imprints with urges so great we cannot escape them. Few of us can be calm in ourselves. I suppose this is one reason...
A French sleuth in England helps the police solve a series of murders linked by the diary pages of a dead woman.
Clean on Top, Dirty on Bottom are several events in US history that damaged the nation. We will not recover from the Civil War for generations if current politics remain, as they surely will. Prohibition and abortion. Wars. Book burnings. Among these is the Hayes act....
In Nazi-occupied France during World War II, a group of Jewish-American soldiers known as "The Basterds" are chosen specifically to spread fear throughout the Third Reich by scalping and brutally killing Nazis. The Basterds, lead by Lt. Aldo Raine soon cross paths with a French-Jewish teenage girl who runs a movie theater in Paris which is targeted by the soldiers.
Detectives something profoundly offensive about this. Oh, it isn’t the gratuitous catalog of stereotypes. It is the fact that they are stereotypes, unmodified in any way. It isn’t that it doesn’t move, but that it does so without passion. Borrowing is part of life, but...
Following the gruesome murder of a young woman in her neighborhood, an English teacher living in New York City — as if to test the limits of her own safety —propels herself into an impossibly risky sexual liaison with a police detective.
In There Campion has a tenderness that is so attractive that if it did not come with warnings, I would build a romantic dreamworld around it. Because that is what we do with deep soft urges. Her films seem always to be about the edges,...
Paul (Macfadyen), a prize-winning war journalist, returns to his remote New Zealand hometown due to the death of his father, battle-scarred and world-weary. For the discontented sixteen-year-old Celia (Barclay) he opens up a world she has only dreamed of. She actively pursues a friendship with him, fascinated by his cynicism and experience of the world beyond her small-town existence. But many, including the members of both their families (Otto, Moy), frown upon the friendship and when Celia goes missing, Paul becomes the increasingly loathed and persecuted prime suspect in her disappearance. As the violent and urgent truth gradually emerges, Paul is forced to confront the family tragedy and betrayal that he ran from as a youth, and to face the grievous consequences of silence and secrecy that has surrounded his entire adult life.
Spatial War, Redhead Landscapes, Image and Word Woven Together Apart is vital to my life in film. From an American perspective, New Zealand is normally clumped in there as well — something that annoys Kiwis to no end. At least in terms of film, they...
A fugitive stumbles onto a movie set just when they need a new stunt man, takes the job as a way to hide out and falls for the leading lady while facing off with his manipulative director.
Citizen Crane are quite a few movies like this, films that reference films and that also aver that the drama within can bend the reality without. The kernel of this idea was ‘Citizen Kane’ but it seemed to flower after John Fowles published ‘The Magus'...
Set during the unsettling disappearances in Buenos Aires during the dictatorship of the 1970s, the film involves theater director Carlos Rueda and his wife Cecilia. Shortly after Cecilia writes an editorial commentary questioning the mysterious abductions, she is herself abducted and taken into police custody.
Until the Next Time am pretty sure that it is not possible for someone other than an Argentine to make a film about this subject and have it matter. These are people who at the beginning of the terror supported it wholeheartedly. The military simply...
Ilsa, a warden at a Nazi death camp that conducts experiments on prisoners, strives to prove that women can withstand more pain and suffering than men, and therefore should be allowed to fight on the frontlines.
Damaged Film, Damaged Viewers touch life in fewer and more unexpected places than you think. Most movies are about other movies or society’s dreams rather than the real world. So films that reference major historical events are interesting beasts. Possibly apart from Vietnam, no war-related event...
A web of intrigue and conspiracy lies beneath the euphoria as the U.S. is about to put a man on the moon for the first time in over thirty years
Wet Powder, Powerful Powder little disaster probably resulted from 9-11. I get the impression that the project was halted halfway through and was just shoved out in this form. No great loss. But it does have two interesting elements. The first is Lena Olin. I think...