The Pianist (2002), Roman Polanski’s film of the true story of Holocaust survivor Wladyslaw Szpilman, is uncompromising in its portrayal of survival. We see the Holocaust through his eyes (via actor Adrien Brody) as the occupying Nazi military slowly but inexorably takes away the rights, the property, the humanity, and in most cases the lives […]
In Gosford Park (2002), Robert Altman brings his gift for big, sprawling dramas knit with a fine weave of characters and a massive cast up to the task of filling them up with lives to the Merchant Ivory idiom of the manners and manors of Britain’s upper crust of yesteryear, 1932 to be specific. The […]
Cabin Fever (2002), Eli Roth’s knowing homage to the gory glory days of 1970s American horror cinema, drops five college kids in a rustic backwoods cabin, stirs in wild-eyed hillbilly caricatures, and then sneaks the real horror—a skin-rotting virus—under their radar. It’s a horror movie. We know it, Roth knows it, and the actors—not playing […]
Enter the world of Jerry Seinfeld as he retires his tried and true stand-up comedy act and builds a new one from the ground up in Comedian (2002). Shot a couple of years after Seinfeld signed off from his smash hit TV show and after putting his old stand-up material to bed after one last […]
Superhero movies have been a big screen staple ever since Superman first flew through his first animated adventure in 1940. But for all the glory of Richard Donner’s majestic 1978 Superman and the kooky dark weirdness of Tim Burton’s Batman films, it took comic book fan-turned-fan-boy director Sam Raimi to capture the graphic thrills and […]
Nicholas Nickleby (Twilight Time, Blu-ray) (2002) – You can’t fault Douglas McGrath for his ambition. Determined to bring Charles Dickens’ 900 page semi-autobiographical novel to the screen, he condenses, chops, and briskly skips through what’s left of a dense pattern of improbably colorful characters, and still winds up with a Dickens of a tale. The […]
Matt Damon’s Jason Bourne is the anti-Bond of Hollywood action cinema. He’s almost emotionless when he clicks into gear and lets his training take over, like a killing machine suddenly switched on. Doug Liman directs The Bourne Identity (2002), an adaptation of Robert Ludlum’s novel (previously made as a TV movie with Richard Chamberlain) about […]
