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 [...]

ROAD TO PERDITION – Tom Hanks, Paul Newman

Road to Perdition (2002)
Director: Sam Mendes
Screenplay: David Self; from Max Allan Collins and Richard Piers Rayner’s graphic novel
Cast: Tom Hanks, Paul Newman, Jude Law, Tyler Hoechlin, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Stanley Tucci, Daniel Craig, Dylan Baker, Ciarán Hinds, Liam Aiken

 

 
British director Sam Mendes won an Academy Award for his first film, American Beauty, released in 1999. Three years later, for his second film, Road to Perdition, Mendes once again relied on the assistance of cinematographer Conrad L. Hall and composer Thomas Newman to create another stylized look at dysfunctional American families. But instead of 1990s suburbia, Road to Perdition throws us into the warped universe of a Depression-era Midwestern town, a place where family values include loyalty, faith, extortion, [...]

ABOUT A BOY – Hugh Grant

About a Boy (2002)
Director: Chris and Paul Weitz
Screenplay: Chris Weitz, Paul Weitz, and Peter Hedges; from Nick Hornby’s novel
Cast: Hugh Grant, Toni Collette, Nicholas Hoult, Rachel Weisz
 

 
"No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee."
With the above statement, seventeenth-century English writer John Donne reached beyond the apparent [...]