GANGS OF NEW YORK – Leonardo DiCaprio, Daniel Day-Lewis

Gangs of New York (2002)
Direction: Martin Scorsese
Screenplay: Jay Cocks, Steven Zaillian, and Kenneth Lonergan, from a story by Cocks. (Herbert Asbury’s Gangs of New York treads on some of the same territory shown in the film.)
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Daniel Day-Lewis, Cameron Diaz, Jim Broadbent, Henry Thomas, Liam Neeson, Brendan Gleeson, John C. Reilly, Gary Lewis, Stephen Graham, Eddie Marsan, Alec McCowen, David Hemmings
 

 

KEEP AWAY YOUR POOR, YOUR TIRED. . .
Those who think that gangs and urban violence are a modern phenomenon should take a look at Martin Scorsese’s ambitious Gangs of New York, a riveting tale of revenge, corruption, and power lust set in mid-1860s New York City. Scorsese had already covered the dangerous streets of his hometown in [...]

THE HOURS d: Stephen Daldry

The Hours (2002)
Direction: Stephen Daldry
Screenplay: David Hare, from Michael Cunningham’s novel
Cast: Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, Ed Harris, Toni Collette, Allison Janney, Claire Danes, Jeff Daniels, Stephen Dillane, John C. Reilly, Miranda Richardson, Eileen Atkins
 

 

Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer-winning The Hours uses Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway (whose working title was "The Hours") as the link that binds its three leading female characters. Far apart in terms of time and space, those three disturbed, unhappy women have in common both the deadness of a life of self-abnegation and the living reality of death itself.
Despite gaps in the narrative, Stephen Daldry’s stabs at melodrama, and one poor central performance, The Hours stands as an intelligent and deeply moving achievement. Most [...]

JFK – Kevin Costner – d: Oliver Stone

JFK (1991)
Director: Oliver Stone
Screenplay: Oliver Stone, Zachary Sklar, from Jim Marrs’ book Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy and Jim Garrison’s book On the Trail of the Assassins
Cast: Kevin Costner, Sissy Spacek, Tommy Lee Jones, Kevin Bacon, Gary Oldman, Joe Pesci, Laurie Metcalf, Jack Lemmon, Sally Kirkland, Jay O. Sanders, Edward Asner, Walter Matthau, Vincent D’Onofrio, Michael Rooker, John Candy, Donald Sutherland
 

 
PARANOID? MOI?
If it’s an Oliver Stone film, it must be bombastic, sentimental, clunky, and controversial. With the exception of "clunky," JFK is all of the above. It is also riveting, earnest, dishonest, moving, irritating, out-of-control paranoid, and, more frequently than one might expect, outright brilliant. In sum, Oliver Stone’s 1991 political thriller about a determined district attorney’s [...]