FBI agent Tom Hanks chases check forger Leonardo DiCaprio in Catch Me If You Can (2002), Steven Spielberg’s take on the true story of Frank Abagnale, Jr. The real-life Abagnale successfully passed himself off as a pilot, a lawyer, and a doctor, and passed over $4 million in forged checks, all before his 21st birthday. […]
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 […]
Steven Spielberg’s future shock crime thriller Minority Report (2002), based on a story by sci-fi visionary Philip K. Dick, offers law enforcement as a preventative force managed by drugged-into-submission psychics: they predict a murder and the cops arrest the perpetrator before he perpetrates anything. The names of the potential killers and victims roll out of […]
There’s a real love of 1960s movie lore in CQ (2002), the feature film debut of Roman Coppola (son of Francis Ford, brother of Sofia, creative assistant to both). Jeremy Davies is the American in Paris hero, an aspiring director in the funky days of 1969. By days he edits a pop-art sci-fi spy adventure […]
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 […]
Between his breakthrough hit Memento and his blockbuster smash Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan helmed Insomnia (2002), the American remake of the icy, sun-bright 1997 Norwegian noir. Relocated to Alaska and starring Al Pacino in the role played by Stellan Skarsgård in the original, it’s built on the same motif: the 24 hour daylight of the […]
Men with Brooms (2002) – Think The Full Monty on ice: Canada’s most famous TV Mountie Paul Gross (Due South) puts tongue firmly in cheek as he applies the old underdog sports team formula to that great Northern obsession: curling. (You thought hockey was the national obsession? So did Canada.) Gross directs, co-writes, produces and stars […]
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 […]
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 […]
