This film, based on the novel by Arthur Golden, unfolds from the perspective of Chiyo (Zhang Ziyi), a girl who, at the age of nine, is sold to a geisha house in Kyoto in the early 1930s. Here, she learns that becoming a geisha can be the single path to wealth and independence for a woman. The head geisha of her house, however, Hatsumomo (Gong Li), ...
Sara embodies all the hopes and fears of young girls in this adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett's classic A Little Princess. Placed in a boarding school by her doting father, Sara seems to have it all. She sleeps in the best room and wears costly dresses. But her fortune cannot rival Sara's generosity. Soon she is the favorite of the school. ...
Lawrence Kasdan originally wrote his script for The Bodyguard in the late 1960s as a vehicle for Steve McQueen; by the time it reached the screen, Kasdan's star was another movie hearthrob, Kevin Costner. When imperious musical superstar Whitney Houston begins receiving death threats, she is compelled to hire a bodyguard. Enter Costner, who ...
Frankie Dunn (Clint Eastwood) is a veteran boxing trainer who has devoted his life to the ring and has precious little to show for it; his daughter never answers his letters, and a fighter he's groomed into contender status has paid him back by signing with another manager, leaving Frankie high and dry. His best friend and faithful employee Eddie ...
Self-centered, avaricious Californian Charlie Babbitt (Tom Cruise) is informed that his long-estranged father has died. Expecting at least a portion of the elder Babbitt's $3 million estate, Charlie learns that all he's inherited is his dad's prize roses and a 1949 Buick Roadmaster. Discovering that the $3 million is being held in trust for an ...
This third film version of the lachrymose Fannie Hurst novel Back Street stars Susan Hayward as Rae Smith the role previously essayed by Irene Dunne (in 1932) and Margaret Sullavan (in 1941). In both earlier films, Rae Smith sacrifices 28 years of her life to her married lover, who can never get a divorce and who compels Rae to squirrel herself ...
Joan Crawford won an Academy Award for her bravura portrayal of the titular heroine in Mildred Pierce. The original James M. Cain novel concerned a tawdry waitress who slept her way to financial security so as to provide a rosy future for her beloved daughter, only to be rewarded by having her true love stolen away by that same daughter. Ranald ...
Based on a novel by Iris Rainer Dart, Beaches traces the 30-year oil-and-water friendship between free-spirited Bronx Jew CC Bloom (Bette Midler) and uptight San Francisco WASP Hillary Essex (Barbara Hershey). The two meet as children in Atlantic City (played by Mayim Bialik and Marcie Leeds) and are reunited in the 1960s, when CC is a struggling ...
Adapted from a Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novelette by author David Gerrold, Menno Meyjes's Martian Child stars John Cusack as a widowed science fiction writer who adopts a boy (Bobby Coleman) who claims to be from the Red Planet. The writer believes the child acts strangely in order to process the difficulty he has had in his young life, but ...
Simon Grim (James Urbaniak) is a garbageman, and his life is about as unpleasant and uneventful as you'd expect given his profession; he doesn't much care for his work, he's treated with violence or contempt by most of the people in his neighborhood, and he shares a house with Mary (Maria Porter), his cranky, pill-head mother, and Fay (Parker ...
This glamorized remake of the 1934 film Imitation of Life bears only a passing resemblance to its source, the best-selling novel by Fannie Hurst. Originally, the heroine was a widowed mother who kept the wolf from the door by setting up a successful pancake business with her black housemaid. In the remake, Lana Turner stars as a would-be actress ...
The Lover is director Jean-Jacques Annaud's adaptation of Marguerite Duras' minimalist 1984 novel. Set in French Indochina in 1929, the film explores the erotic charge of forbidden love. Jane March plays a French teenager sent to a Saigon boarding school, while Tony Leung is a 32-year Chinese aristocrat. They look at each and they both see a ...
The Oprah Book Club best-seller by Janet Fitch makes it to the big screen in this adaptation from British director Peter Kosminsky. White Oleander recounts the traumatic adolescence of Astrid Magnusson (Alison Lohman), who finds herself an orphan after her short-fused, enigmatic artist mother Ingrid (Michelle Pfeiffer) is carted off to prison on ...
A woman learns to love life when she finds out she won't be around long in this comedy. Georgia Byrd (Queen Latifah) lives in New Orleans, where she works in the cookware department of an upscale gourmet supply shop. While Georgia carries a torch for Sean (LL Cool J), one of her co-workers, she doesn't have the nerve to tell him, and despite her ...
The genesis of MGM's Freaks was a magazine piece by Ted Robbins titled Spurs. The story involved a terrible revenge enacted by a mean-spirited circus midget upon his normal-sized wife. In adapting Spurs for the screen, writers Willis Goldbeck, Leon Gordon, Edgar Allan Wolf, and Al Boasberg retained the circus setting and the little man-big woman ...
Previously filmed in 1930 with Lawrence Tibbett and Grace Moore, the robust Sigmund Romberg operetta New Moon was given another airing in 1940 as Nelson Eddy-Jeanette MacDonald vehicle. Set in 18th century Louisiana, the story concerns the relationship between haughty plantation owner Marianne de Beaumanoir (MacDonald) and her handsome bondservant ...
Olive Higgins Prouty's popular novel was transformed into nearly two hours of high-grade soap opera by several masters of the trade: Warner Bros., Bette Davis, Paul Henreid, director Irving Rapper, and screenwriter Casey Robinson. Davis plays repressed Charlotte Vale, dying on the vine thanks to her domineering mother (Gladys Cooper). All-knowing ...
Sling Blade marked the directorial debut of country singer turned actor Billy Bob Thornton, who also authored the script (expanding George Hickenlooper's acclaimed short Some Folks Call it a Sling Blade) and stars in the picture. Thornton plays Karl Childers, a mildly retarded man who spent most of his life in a mental institution. When Karl was a ...
The Jorgensons are a wealthy family spending the summer on a resort island. Ken (Richard Egan), Helen (Constance Ford) and daughter Molly (Sandra Dee) settle in to a beach house on the island where Ken was a young lifeguard twenty years ago. He rediscovers Sylvia (Dorothy McGuire), with whom he had an earlier affair before she married Bart Hunter ...
Playwright Lillian Hellman first wrote of the horrible Hubbard family in her 1939 play The Little Foxes. In this lavish 1941 film version, Bette Davis takes over for Broadway's Tallulah Bankhead in the role of conniving turn-of-the-century Southern aristocrat Regina Hubbard Giddens. Regina's equally odious brothers (Charles Dingle and Carl Benton ...
In this lush, lurid adaptation of the 1957 Tennessee Williams one-act, Elizabeth Taylor and Katharine Hepburn play a seemingly insane, young New Orleans debutante and the wealthy aunt who wants to lobotomize her. Dr. John Cukrowicz (Montgomery Clift) is a gifted Chicago brain surgeon stymied by the primitive operating conditions at the New Orleans ...
Richard Fleischer directed this lurid historical drama based on the novel by Kyle Onstott. The story begins on a run-down plantation lorded over by Warren Maxwell (James Mason) and his son Hammond (Perry King). Hammond travels to New Orleans where he buys a top-of-the-line slave, Mede (Ken Norton), at an auction. Hammond is proud of his purchase, ...
Goodbye, Mr. Chips, based on James Hilton's novel, is a melodrama about a shy British teacher named Mr. Chipping (Robert Donat) who devotes his life to teaching "his boys" after the death of his lovely, energetic American wife Katherine (Greer Garson). Told via flashbacks, the film features an aged Mr. Chipping looking back nostalgically at his ...
In this fact-based cable TV drama, Thora Birch stars as Liz Murray, the daughter of a loving but extremely dysfunctional Bronx family. Weighed down with a coke-addict father and an HIV-infected mother, Liz spends her early years shuttling from squalid apartment to public shelter and back again. At 15, she breaks away from her home life (what there ...
Jane Fonda, Felicity Huffman, and Lindsay Lohan star in director Garry Marshall's tale of a rebellious young woman who is sent to spend the summer with her grandmother when her frustrated mother fails to find a means of curbing her unruly behavior. Rachel (Lohan) is an out-of-control teen whose reckless drinking, foul mouth, and hysterical fits ...
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