[5] Edward Zwick (Glory, Legends of the Fall) directs this yuppie ‘windy city’ romance starring brat-packers Rob Lowe and Demi Moore. It’s your typical boy-meets-girl story. They have sex, they fall in love, they move in together, they fight, they make up, they fight, they make up… and in the end we’re all reminded how much men suck. (No, really.) In lesser hands, this sort …
[6] Ruth Chatterton (Frisco Jenny) stars as a powerful automobile executive who plucks young men out of her workforce to have sex with and vows never to marry. But when a rival businessman (George Brent) refuses her advances, she begins to wonder whether the busy, working life is really meant for her. Chatterton does a fine job with Female, a film remembered for its notorious …
[5] Rosanna Arquette stars as a bored New Jersey housewife who becomes infatuated with Susan (Madonna), a nomadic woman she’s never met who uses the newspaper personal ads to keep up with her boyfriend. When one of the ads mentions a time and place to meet up, Arquette spies on them and ends up being mistaken for Susan after hitting her head and getting amnesia. …
[8] Hollywood often waters down characters and storylines to make them universally appealing. Filmmakers like Paul Thomas Anderson with Licorice Pizza, or David O. Russell with Joy and The Fighter, are challenging that notion with stories of tremendous specificity — specificity of character, location, obstacle, and endeavor — that find universal appeal without dilution. In pursuit of that specificity, Anderson casts two unknown actors as …
[7] Daniel Day-Lewis (My Left Foot, There Will Be Blood) won his third Oscar for his convincing portrait of America’s 16th president during the final months of the Civil War. Lincoln is a decades-long pet project for director Steven Spielberg, who chose Angels in America scribe Tony Kushner to make Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln the foundation …
[7] Thirteen-year-old aspiring writer Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan) accuses her older sister’s lover of a crime he didn’t commit, effectively condemning him to years of prison and compulsory military service. The lovers (Keira Knightley and James McAvoy) stay connected through letter-writing, but the unfolding tragedies of World War II keep them ever apart. Years later, Briony wants to atone for the sin that tore her …
[2] Mary Tyler Moore (Ordinary People) and Christine Lahti (Running on Empty) star as newfound friends who discover a terrible coincidence — that the man Lahti is having an affair with is none other than Moore’s husband (Cheers‘s Ted Danson). Lahti is the first to realize the problem and tries to break it off with Danson. But fate intervenes, and the secret eventually comes out. …
[6] This movie has the distinction of being the first released film about the eponymous serial killer who terrorized the San Francisco Bay Area in the late ’60s. While it has all the low production values you might expect from a 16mm low-budget drive-in flick, the screenplay is structurally sound and does an interesting job marrying fact with fiction. The Zodiac Killer starts off by …
[8] Socially-conscious filmmaker Stanley Kramer (Inherit the Wind, Judgment at Nuremberg) made an impact early in his directing career with this dramatic chase story of two escaped convicts evading authorities while chained together at the wrists. The twist? One prisoner’s white and the other’s black. This poetic plot point allows The Defiant Ones to address racism in America while also delivering as a tense cat …
[4] Barbara Stanwyck plays a poor waitress who falls in love with a rich man (Regis Toomey), but his mother (Clara Blandick) is determined to keep the two apart. She even goes so far as to have a judge arrest her on a phony morals charge and send her to ninety-day reform program! Once she’s released, Stanwyck starts a new life and becomes a infamous …
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