Jack Nicholson plays retiring insurance actuary Warren Schmidt in Alexander Payne's About Schmidt. Schmidt has settled into a dormant life. He has an unfulfilling marriage to Helen (June Squibb), and conspires to spend as much time away from her as possible. Schmidt's daughter Jeannie (Hope Davis) is engaged to Randall Hertzel (Dermot Mulroney), a ...
Much as he would later do with Shakespeare in Love (1998), writer Tom Stoppard delivered a tale of Shakespearean origin from a skewed and unexpected perspective. In this case, it's the perspective of two relatively minor characters from Hamlet, Rosencrantz (Gary Oldman) and Guildenstern (Tim Roth), courtiers who, in the original play, were ...
In this biting comedy satirizing Hollywood cynicism from writer-director Blake Edwards, Felix Farmer (Richard Mulligan) is a motion picture director whose career is on the skids. Having just completed a family musical that is sure to be a $30 million flop, Felix knows that his days are numbered and tries unsuccessfully to commit suicide. When he ...
Actor and playwright Tom McCarthy makes his feature film debut as a writer/director with the quirky comedy drama The Station Agent. In New Jersey, Finbar McBride (Peter Dinklage) is a four-foot-tall lonely man who chooses to live the life of a hermit in an abandoned train yard following the death of his friend. While he is there, he unexpectedly ...
The legendary Shakespearean character Sir John Falstaff, the notoriously drunken, obese, and yet charming companion of the young Henry V, steps up from supporting character in several plays to the central focus of Orson Welles' Chimes at Midnight, considered by many critics the best of the director's acclaimed Shakespeare films. The script borrows ...
With an insane asylum standing in for everyday society, Milos Forman's 1975 film adaptation of Ken Kesey's novel is a comically sharp indictment of the Establishment urge to conform. Playing crazy to avoid prison work detail, manic free spirit Randle P. McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) is sent to the state mental hospital for evaluation. There he ...
Woody Allen immerses himself in the world of vintage jazz in this period mock-biography of a musician gifted in his art but a sad student in life. Emmet Ray (Sean Penn) is a 1930s jazz guitarist considered one of the finest musicians ever to touch a fretboard, second only to the legendary Django Reinhardt. For all the passion and sensitivity of ...
The fact-based story of an unconventional physician who attempted to heal patients with laughter, based on his own book and mixing equal doses of scatological humor and pathos. Robin Williams stars as Hunter Adams, a troubled young man who commits himself to a mental institution in the late 1960s. His experiences there convince Adams to become a ...
This remake of the 1975 German film Jakob der Lügner stars Robin Williams in a dramatic role as a man who uses his active imagination to bring a ray of hope where hope was all but unknown. Jakob Heym (Robin Williams) is the owner of a small café during the Nazi occupation of Poland; he has little money and is struggling to keep body and soul alive ...
A gentle film critic hooks up with a violent drifter in this HIV-positive road movie, which marked the emergence of writer/director Gregg Araki into the art house mainstream. Jon (Craig Gilmore) has just learned he has the virus that causes AIDS. Still in a state of shock, he stumbles through his usual routine -- until he meets Luke (Mike Dytri), ...
This drama was based on the true story of a young German Jew who survived the Holocaust by falling in with the Nazis. Solomon Perel (Marco Hofschneider) is the son of a Jewish shoe salesman coming of age in Germany during the rise of Adolf Hitler. In 1938, a group of Nazis attack Solomon's family home; his sister is killed, and 13-year-old Solomon ...
Nights of Cabiria opens with Cabiria (Giulietta Masina) and her boyfriend playfully embracing by the seaside -- and then he shoves her into the water and steals her purse. Cabiria is revived by some local boys and runs off by herself, shouting. What follows is a series of similarly humiliating episodes, in which the defiantly positive prostitute ...
Radu Mihaileanu directed this French-Belgian-Romanian-Dutch comedy-drama, set in Central Europe during the summer of 1941. Yiddish-speaking Jews purchase a train, forge identity papers, and leave town. Posing as both prisoners and Nazis, they hope to reach Palestine via the Soviet Union, but problems arise when they encounter real Germans. To make ...
A gentle man suddenly finds himself at a loss for what to do when he suspects his wife has been unfaithful in this comedy drama from director Alan Rudolph. David and Dana Hurst (Campbell Scott and Hope Davis) are a married couple with three children who also happen to be dentists who share an office. David is a quiet and reserved sort, while Dana ...
This tragicomedy is the second feature for Dusan Makavejev, the most celebrated Yugoslavian director of the 1960s. Included in this montage of stories is an erotic love scene, a strudel recipe, rat catching, and a graphic autopsy of a female victim. The plot concerns a love affair between a switchboard operator and a rat catcher. In most of his ...
Perhan (Davor Dujmovic) is a Gypsy teenager with the ability to move objects with his mind. A criminal named Ahmed convinces him to leave his devoted grandmother (Ljubica Adzovic) and loving girlfriend, and to use his powers to make some money illegally. While becoming a man and learning the trade of crime, the boy searches for his sister (who was ...
In this sentimental, tragicomic drama, Matteo Scuro (Marcello Mastroianni) is an old widower living in Sicily. His five grown children have scattered all over Italy, and he has heard nothing but glowing reports from them about their lives and careers. One day he takes it into his head to visit these paragons who have fulfilled every one of his ...
Noted theater director Sam Mendes, who was responsible for the acclaimed 1998 revival of Cabaret and Nicole Kidman's turn in The Blue Room, made his motion picture debut with this film about the dark side of an American family, and about the nature and price of beauty in a culture obsessed with outward appearances. Kevin Spacey plays Lester ...
A man struggles to get a grip on a life that's spinning out of control in this emotional comedy drama. Dave Spritz (Nicolas Cage) is a television weatherman on a high-profile Chicago news program. Professionally, Dave is doing just fine -- he makes great money for a job that demands little effort, and he has a shot at an assignment with a network ...
Canadian filmmaker Thom Fitzgerald directs the sentimental ensemble drama The Event. Nick (Parker Posey) is a district attorney investigating several deaths in the gay community of New York City's Chelsea District. It seems that many AIDS sufferers have died under similar mysterious circumstances. Each case suggest the use of assisted suicide, ...
Italian filmmaker Lina Wertmuller directs the black comedy Pasqualino Settebellezze (Seven Beauties). During WWII, Pasqualino Frafuso (Giancarlo Giannini) ends up lost in a dense forest along with fellow army deserter Francesco (Piero De Orio). After they witness a mass execution by German soldiers, Francesco admits his moral opposition to the ...
Ron Silver stars as Herman, a Holocaust survivor who believes that his wife Tamara (Anjelica Huston) perished in the concentration camps. He marries fellow immigrant Yadwiga (Margaret Sophie Stein), whose family sheltered him from the Nazis, and resettles in the Coney Island area of New York. Not all that devoted to Yadwiga, Herman begins an ...
A woman who is blackmailed by her boss discovers his plans are not at all what she imagined in this low-key comedy-drama. Benjamin Hoffman (Peter Sellers) is a businessman who has eyes for a secretary working in his office, Janet Smith (Sinead Cusack). Smith is engaged to marry a man named Tom Mitchell (Jeremy Bulloch), but when Hoffman learns ...
In this WW II tragicomedy, famed Italian funnyman Roberto Benigni (The Monster) portrays Guido, who moves during the '30s from the country to a Tuscan town, where he is entranced by schoolteacher Dora (Nicoletta Braschi, Benigni's real-life wife). Dora likes Guido, but she remains faithful to her pompous fiancé, so Guido has an uphill struggle. ...
Terms of Endearment covers three decades in the lives of widow Aurora Greenway (Shirley MacLaine) and her daughter Emma (Debra Winger). Fiercely protected by Aurora throughout childhood, Emma runs into resistance from her mother when she marries wishy-washy college teacher Flap (Jeff Daniels). Aurora is even more put out at the prospect of being a ...
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