While other reviewers (and the crew interviewed on the DVD’s bonus features) compare it with Rosemary’s Baby, I think it refers back much more to the classic — and disturbing — Don’t Look Now by Nicholas Roeg.
Steven Spielberg's MUNICH
That the issues raised by this faux history of events kicked off by the massacre of Israelis at the 1972 Olympics are still so relevant is a testament to Spielberg’s intelligence and sense of morality.
It also helps that he’s a terrific film-maker who is willing to attack complex topics in an intelligent, personal, and thoughtful way.
Memoirs of a Geisha
How could I resist a film starring Ziyi Zhang, Michelle Yeoh, and Gong Li? Especially when they frequently appear on screen in the same scenes together? When it’s a film about slavery.
Zhang Yimou's THE ROAD HOME
A businessman returns to his country home in rural China to bury his recently deceased schoolteacher father. He finds his distraught mother insisting on a long funeral procession with friends and former students bearing the coffin. The road to be taken has special meaning dating back to the parents' courtship. It is the courtship in flashback that dominates the film.
I’ve been renting DVD’s from Netflix since before 1999, back when they were charging on a per disc basis. I remember getting a bill for $90 one month that made me jump out of my skin. Luckily they switched to a flat rate per month after that.
Marius Penczner's “I WAS A ZOMBIE FOR THE F.B.I.”
What possessed me to rent this movie? No matter. I enjoyed it.
Carnival of Souls
This black and white gem from the early Kennedy administration era is a window into the past.
Robots
I especially liked the battle sequence at the end with its darkness, its massed robotic antagonists, and the feeling I was seeing some real cartoon malevolence the likes of which I haven’t seen since Oogie Boogie in Nightmare Before Christmas.
Yasujiro Ozu's FLOATING WEEDS
This 1959 film follows a down on its luck troupe of actors as they visit a small Japanese seaside village in the late 1950’s to perform popular plays on a small community stage.
Yasujiro Ozu's TOKYO STORY
This 1953 classic by Yasujiro Ozu (Floating Weeds) is a masterpiece of elegant, artistic, and human filmmaking.
Yasujiro Ozu's EARLY SUMMER
In this Japanese film from 1951, 28-year-old Noriko (played by Setsuko Hara, who also appeared in Ozu’s Tokyo Story) lives with her three-generation family. She helps support them with the wages she earns in her downtown Tokyo clerical office job. Her family decides that she is getting along in years and needs to get married. The wheels of an arranged marriage start turning. This leads to complications.
Expo: Magic of the White City
This documentary about the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago is the perfect companion to the book The Devil in the White City. While the latter's serial murderer is never mentioned in the documentary, the visual splendor of the Fair is portrayed in a detailed and awesome manner on the screen.
George Pal's “WAR OF THE WORLDS”
George Pal’s 1953 WAR OF THE WORLDS is now available on a special edition DVD. How does this 50 year old movie hold up? Let’s get the obvious out of the way:
HEAVEN is an almost leisurely emotional odyssey of two seemingly dissimilar people — one a murderer, the other a young police officer — that evolves into a meditation on the relationship between morality and … gorgeous aerial photography?
Lain
I originally published this review in 2002. I thought about it again aftre seeing The Last Exile, a more recent Japanese animated science fiction TV series.
Yasujiro Ozu's GOOD MORNING
It’s the late 1950’s in a new cookie-cutter Tokyo suburb. Two young brothers are eager to get a television. A young couple nearby has one which they let the kids watch (they love sumo wrestling) but the kids’ parents are concerned that the young couple’s laid-back attitude will rub off on the kids.
Richard Curtis' LOVE ACTUALLY
Back in the Day, the phrase “English ensemble actor film” brought to mind names like John Gielgud, John Mills, Alec Guiness, and Trevor Howard. Love Actually shows how far we’ve come when we can watch a blank-faced actor like Martin Freeman ( Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) nonchalantly chatting away while feigning naked sex with his soon-to-be-girlfriend.
Vidhu Vinod Chopra's “MISSION KASHMIR”
I rented this film because I was reading a book (Maximum City) by one of the screenwriters (Suketu Mehta) and because, let’s face it, I crave a Bollywood fix from time to time. I was not disappointed. This is now one of my favorites.
Robert Schwentke's FLIGHTPLAN
This tightly plotted thriller pits Jodie Foster against the disappearance of her character’s little daughter on a giant super-jumbo airliner in midair. Playing a jet aircraft engineer who helped design the aircraft where most of this midair plot takes place, Foster pits her innate intelligence and cunning against both the disappearance and her natural instinct to panic.