This year marks the 50th anniversary of one of the best films ever made, David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai, which previewed in Hollywood on October 31, 1957, and opened two days later in London. The film, a tremendous success with both audiences and critics, won seven Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director … Read more
The release of Spider-Man 3 set several box-office records, including the highest domestic opening ($151.1 million) and the highest worldwide opening ($382 million). The film will soon join Spider-Man (number seven) and Spider-Man 2 (number ten) in the top-ten list for all-time highest grossing films—maybe even topping it. Although Columbia Pictures maintains that Spider-Man 3 … Read more
In 1971, a minor novelist named Clifford Irving convinced his publisher, McGraw-Hill, that he’d been contacted by Howard Hughes to write the reclusive billionaire’s authorized biography. Irving claimed that Hughes had chosen him for the project because Hughes liked Irving’s 1969 biography, Fake! The Story of Elmyr de Hory, the Greatest Art Forger of Our … Read more
In the past six months, Hollywood has released two major pictures that have each dealt with one of America’s two most famous unsolved criminal mysteries, both of which took place in California. Last year’s The Black Dahlia, directed by Brian De Palma, covered the gruesome and much-publicized murder of aspiring actress Elizabeth Short, whose naked … Read more
Breach, the new spy film from director Billy Ray, deals with Robert Hanssen, an FBI agent who sold documents to the KGB and the SVR (the Russian intelligence agency) in post-collapse Russia. During his 16 years as a traitor, Hanssen provided thousands of crucial documents to the enemies of his country, estimated by his Soviet … Read more
Now that all the 2006 Hollywood hype is over, it’s clear that last year, like most recent years, was another weak one for films. Looking back, many critics have tried to put a good face on things, but they’ve still struggled with their ten-best lists, surely aware that very few films made last year will … Read more
Mega-producer Jerry Bruckheimer has recently released Déjà Vu, his sixth collaboration with British director Tony Scott. Their previous films include Top Gun (1986), Crimson Tide (1995), Enemy of the State (1998), and Man on Fire (2004); Bruckheimer is also the producer of television’s top-rated show CSI, as well as its multiple spinoffs. As the current … Read more
On February 23, 1945, Joe Rosenthal, an Associated Press photographer, took a picture of five Marines and a Navy corpsman raising the U.S. flag atop Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima. It was the fifth day of a brutal 30-day camÂpaign across the small island that would cost 6,800 American lives and produce 27 Congressional Medals … Read more
All the King’s Men, the lifeless new adaptation of Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer-winning novel about the Southern political demagogue Willie Stark, is a fascinating failure on many levels—especially since the project seemed to have everything going for it from the beginning. Based on a classic American novel, it quickly attracted a talented director and notable … Read more
Twenty-five years ago, the most discussed and highly touted film in the world was Reds, an epic paean to the life of Jack Reed, an enthusiastic witness to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent co-founder of the American Communist Party. The film had been shot in four countries with a budget of $35 … Read more
M. Night Shyamalan is the most original, inÂteresting, and visionary filmmaker in Hollywood. He’s also the only Hollywood filmmaker who consistently shows a real respect for religious belief in his work. “I believe in believing,” he’s stated, rather emÂphatically, and his films reveal a sinÂcere faith in a higher realm, transcenÂdence, and providence. Those films … Read more
In the fourth century, St. John Chrysostom said, quite simply,“There is nothing worse than blasÂphemy.” But the Church has not alÂways known how to deal with frontal attacks against her doctrine, especially in more modern times and democratic societies, and the “Da Vinci phenomÂenon” has made that abundantly clear. At first glance, it might seem … Read more
Twentieth Century Fox has recently released its much-hyped political thriller, The Sentinel, starring Michael Douglas and Kiefer Sutherland. A crucial element of the film’s pre-release promotion was several extended previews aired during the Fox television show 24, also starring Sutherland. Unfortunately, The Sentinel is not as good as a single episode of the ground-breaking televiÂsion … Read more
The Wachowski brothers are back on IMAX screens across the country with V for VenÂdetta, which they wrote for their proÂtégé, director James McTeigue. A sci- fi political thriller based on the 1980s graphic novel by Alan Moore and DaÂvid Lloyd, it tells the story of the mysÂterious V, who blows up the Old Bailey … Read more
It’s June 1940, and streams of refugees are flooding into the French countryside to escape the blitzkrieg of Paris. As the Luftwaffe bombers appear in the sky, the frightened refugees fall to the ground, except for a lovely little girl, Paulette, who runs over a bridge in pursuit of her dog, Jock. Terrified, her parents … Read more
C.S. Lewis believed that people who encounter a good story will read it “ten, twenty, thirty times during the course of their lives,” and the same could be said of good films. In 1950, Lewis published The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, initiating his seven-volume Chronicles of Narnia, and the children’s book has been … Read more
In the 35-year stretch from the death of Hank Williams in 1953 until the rise of Randy Travis and Garth Brooks in the late 1980s, country music produced two undeniable legends: George Jones, the quintessential country crooner, and Johnny Cash, the internationally acclaimed “Man in Black.” In 1998, five years before Cash’s death, the singer … Read more
Roman Polanski, a fugitive from American justice, has recently released his much-anticipated adaptation of Charles Dickens’s second novel, Oliver Twist. This project has aroused a great deal of interest over the past few years for two reasons. The first was perhaps the most obvious: Why bother? During the last 80 years, there have been more … Read more
Since the Iron Curtain fell in 1989, the British novelist John le Carre (born David Cornwell) has been obliged to shift his primary focus from Cold War moral equivocation to more ordinary topics of leftist political correctness. Why Cornwell, a man who served with the British Foreign Service (both MI5 and MI6) in Germany—where he … Read more