Melrose Place: Supersoap 2.0
Photo: Fox The show that started out as a lame copy of producer Darren Star’s Beverly Hills 90210 became the hottest primetime soap on U.S. television in the 1990s. Who…
Crash: Learning Who You Are
Thandiwe Newton and Matt Dillon. Photo: Lionsgate It begins with Don Cheadle’s character stating the theme of the movie. He talks about how people in a normal city walk and…
Boston Public
David E. Kelley paused his attorneys for a while and created a show about Winslow High School in Boston, a fictional inner-city school that was always short on cash but…
Million Dollar Baby: No Guts, No Glory
Clint Eastwood and Hilary Swank. Photo: Warner As an actor, Clint Eastwood is a genuine American icon. His career as a director on the other hand looked quite uneven in…
Shadow of the Vampire: A Symphony of Horrors
Willem Dafoe. Photo: Lionsgate Anyone who has ever seen Nosferatu, F.W. Murnau’s marvelous, silent vampire flick, is likely to never forget the appearance of Count Orlok, the bald, rat-like bloodsucker…
Downfall: Blind Patriotism
Bruno Ganz. Photo: Newmarket Films The man who emerges from a back room to pick his next secretary is a kind, grandfatherly man who treats the young aspirants with respect…
Falcon Crest: Wine, Women and Power
Photo: CBS At first they all seem to have had realism in mind, the primetime soaps of the 1980s. The first episodes of Falcon Crest showed a middle-class family moving…
Ray
Director Taylor Hackford tried to get this project off the ground for several years, a biopic on the life of soul giant Ray Charles. It is a fairly conventional film,…
The Beach
Young American Richard (Leonardo DiCaprio), who’s backpacking in Thailand, finds a map that supposedly will take him to a paradise untouched by humans. John Hodge's novel is a modern classic…
The Piano Teacher
Erika Kohut (Isabelle Huppert) is a Viennese piano teacher in her forties who agrees to have an affair with a much younger man (Benoît Magimel)… as long as he fulfills…