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BEING JULIA – Annette Bening, Jeremy Irons

Being Julia (2004)
Direction: István Szabó
Screenplay: Ronald Harwood; from W. Somerset Maugham’s 1937 novel Theatre
Cast: Annette Bening, Jeremy Irons, Shaun Evans, Bruce Greenwood, Miriam Margolyes, Juliet Stevenson, Lucy Punch, Michael Gambon, Sheila McCarthy, Leigh Lawson, Rosemary Harris, Rita Tushingham
 

 

A LITTLE ABOUT AVICE
In Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1950 Oscar-winning classic All About Eve, Bette Davis plays Margo Channing, a major Broadway star who, despite her talent and wit, falls prey to the ambitious wannabe Eve Harrington: sweet, soft-spoken Anne Baxter on the outside, ruthless, poisonous gargoyle on the inside.
More than a decade earlier, in 1937 to be exact, W. Somerset Maugham had written Theatre, a novel about a West End star, the stage diva Julia Lambert (that four years later would [...]

YESTERDAY d: Darrell Roodt

Yesterday (2004)
Direction and screenplay: Darrell Roodt
Cast: Leleti Khumalo, Lihle Mvelase, Kenneth Kambule, Harriet Lehabe, Camilla Walker
 

 
To date, nowhere has the AIDS pandemic been felt more strongly than in Sub-Saharan Africa, home to approximately 10% of the world population and to more than 70% of the planet’s 40 million AIDS cases. In the past twenty-five years, it is estimated that more than 20 million Sub-Saharan Africans have died from complications of the disease. Even today, drug cocktails that are relatively accessible in other parts of the globe are still beyond the means of the vast majority of Africans.
Writer-director Darrell Roodt’s South African drama Yesterday is set in this catastrophic scenario. The film depicts the effects of AIDS in the life [...]

MUSIC OF THE HEART – Meryl Streep – d: Wes Craven

Music of the Heart (1999)
Direction: Wes Craven
Screenplay: Pamela Gray
Cast: Meryl Streep, Angela Bassett, Aidan Quinn, Cloris Leachman, Gloria Estefan, Kieran Culkin, Charlie Hofheimer, Michael Angarano, Jay O. Sanders
 

 
Wes Craven, the director of the Scream franchise and of the original A Nightmare on Elm Street, is hardly the kind of filmmaker from whom one would expect a syrupy motion picture about a determined violin teacher who wins the hearts and minds of her inner-city school students.
Yet, Craven is the man responsible for Music of the Heart, a film completely devoid of slashed faces, lethal stabbings, and deadly fingernails. Instead, this distaff version of Mr. Holland’s Opus — with touches of To Sir with Love — offers loads of sentiment, [...]

HOTEL RWANDA – Don Cheadle

Hotel Rwanda (2004)
Direction: Terry George
Screenplay: Keir Pearson and Terry George
Cast: Don Cheadle, Sophie Okonedo, Nick Nolte, Joaquin Phoenix, Desmond Dube, Neil McCarthy, Jean Reno
 

 
In the second quarter of 1994, while much of the world was gearing up to the World Cup to be held in Los Angeles, one of history’s deadliest wholesale slaughters of human beings was taking place in Central Africa. Following the death of Rwanda’s President Juvenal Habyarimana, an ethnic Hutu whose plane was shot down above the Kigali airport on April 6, 1994, the Hutu powers-that-be decided it was time to eliminate the Tutsi minority who were blamed for the crash. What followed in the next three months was an orgy of hackings and shootings throughout [...]

VERA DRAKE d: Mike Leigh

Vera Drake (2004)
Direction and screenplay: Mike Leigh
Cast: Imelda Staunton, Philip Davis, Peter Wight, Daniel Mays, Alex Kelly, Eddie Marsan, Ruth Sheen, Sally Hawkins, Chris O’Dowd, Heather Craney
 

 
Director Mike Leigh’s touches are found everywhere in Vera Drake, from the drab working-class social setting to the somewhat bizarre characters that inhabit that milieu (at least in Leigh’s oeuvre). Even so, Vera Drake cannot quite be considered a Mike Leigh Film. This bleak drama about a kind and gentle — if none too bright — part-time cleaning woman, part-time wife and mother, and part-time abortionist truly belongs to its leading lady, veteran stage and screen actress Imelda Staunton, whose superb tour de force carries the film to heights it would never have [...]

THE DEVIL STRIKES AT NIGHT d: Robert Siodmak

Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam / The Devil Strikes at Night (1957)
Direction: Robert Siodmak
Screenplay: Werner Jörg Lüddecke, from an article by Will Berthold
Cast: Claus Holm, Annemarie Düringer, Mario Adorf, Hannes Messemer, Carl Lange, Werner Peters
 

 

After more than a decade in Hollywood, German-born director Robert Siodmak (nominated for an Academy Award for The Killers in 1946) resumed his European career in the mid-1950s. In 1957, he directed Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam / The Devil Strikes at Night, an intriguing, well-crafted crime drama about the pursuit of a serial killer — and its political consequences — during the last months of the mass-murderous Nazi regime.
Inspired by real events, The Devil Strikes at Night begins as war-scarred Hamburg is deeply shaken by [...]

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: THE CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL – Johnny Depp

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)
Direction: Gore Verbinski
Screenplay: Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio; from an original screen story by Stuart Beattie and Jay Wolpert
Cast: Johnny Depp, Geoffrey Rush, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley, Jack Davenport, Jonathan Pryce, Lee Arenberg
 

 

WHEN KEITH MET ZASU
Pirate films were a popular Hollywood staple for about three decades, from the mid-1920s (The Sea Hawk, The Black Pirate) to the mid-1950s, when the genre, by then relegated to mostly B films, began to die down. Sporadic resurrections in the last two decades have been disastrous (Pirates, Cutthroat Island), something that didn’t bode well for Disney’s "film adaptation" of one of their theme-park rides. However, Neptune and assorted sea gods have apparently been in [...]

21 GRAMS – Sean Penn, Naomi Watts

21 Grams (2003)
Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu
Screenplay: Guillermo Arriaga
Cast: Sean Penn, Naomi Watts, Benicio del Toro, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Melissa Leo, Danny Huston, Eddie Marsan, John Rubinstein
 

 

Shot in documentary-style, 21 Grams is a bleak, convoluted, and surprisingly powerful drama about three individuals linked to both one another and to the immediacy of death: Paul (Sean Penn) is a dying man in dire need of a heart transplant; Jack (Benicio Del Toro) is a born-again ex-con who has run over a father and his two daughters as they were crossing a street; and Cristina (Naomi Watts) is the woman whose family Jack has killed. (By the way, the film’s title refers to the alleged weight of a person’s soul. That figure came [...]

THE GRANDFATHER d: José Luis Garci

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