A sad, melancholy ache pervades Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee's haunting, moving film that, like his other movies, explores societal constraints and the passions that lurk underneath. This time, however, instead of taking on ancient China, 19th-century England, or '70s suburbia, Lee uses the tableau of the American West in the early '60s to show how two lovers are bound by their expected ...
A surprise hit when it was released in September 2005, The Exorcism of Emily Rose tells a riveting horror story while tackling substantial issues of religious and spiritual belief. It's based on the true story of Anneliese Michel, a German student who believed she was possessed by demons, and whose death during an attempted exorcism in 1976 led to the conviction of two priests on charges of ...
Full of morally flawed characters, and shot in grainy desaturated colours, Steven Spielberg's Minority Report is futuristic film noir with a far-fetched B-movie plot that's so feverishly presented the audience never gets a chance to ponder its many improbabilities. Based on a short story by Philip K Dick, the film is set in the Orwellian near-future of 2054, where a trio of ...
In its seven-year run on television, Party of Five managed to portray extreme emotions in a contained, tasteful, and level-headed way without sacrificing poignancy or richness. Aimed at a teen audience but with crossover appeal to most viewers, the series dealt with recurring themes of loss and disappointment, made all the more interesting because Party of Five's major characters, ...
Party of Five: The Complete Second Season is the absorbing follow-up to the first season's introduction of the Salinger children and their initial trauma following the death of their parents at the hands of a drunk driver. After a year of seemingly endless individual sacrifices, where the older kids did what they had to do to keep their family together at the expense of schoolwork, jobs ...
Writer/Director Cameron Crowe's affable twentysomething romantic comedy is less a tale of tortured love than a prescient portrait of a culture on the cusp of Generation X--that is Seattle, circa 1991. One-time Rolling Stone journalist Crowe, ever aware of pop trends, lovingly details a society newly beguiled by slackers, answerphones, self-analysis, the coffee-house fetish, post-AIDS safe ...