"Remember, remember the fifth of November," for on this day, in 2020, the minds of the masses shall be set free. So says code-name V (Hugo Weaving), a man on a mission to shake society out of its blank complacent stares in the film V for Vendetta. His tactics, however, are a bit revolutionary, to say the least.
Of all the actresses playing opposite the screen's many Tarzans, perhaps the most famously erotic was Bo Derek. The star who was a 10 with Dudley Moore rates several tree notches higher in the reckoning of the Ape Man. He defends her against a beachcombing King of the Beasts, untangles her from a python's squeeze and takes on kidnapping primitives who have covered her with white body paint. The Englishwoman who comes to West Africa to find her father (Richard Harris) obviously finds more and l'amour.
Based on the Joseph Conrad story "Amy Foster," this swirlingly romantic melodrama tells the story of a Polish sailor (Vincent Perez) shipwrecked and washed ashore on the English coast in the 19th century. Found by a servant girl, Amy (Rachel Weisz), who is a village outcast, he is considered retarded because no one can understand what he says. But slowly, through Amy's love and the doctor's tutelage, the sailor learns enough English to decide he wants to make an honest woman out of Amy. Which doesn't sit well with the disapproving villagers, who don't like Amy.
I have a bad feeling about this, says the young Obi-Wan Kenobi (played by Ewan McGregor) in Star Wars: Episode I, The Phantom Menace as he steps off a spaceship and into the most anticipated cinematic event... well, ever. He might as well be speaking for the legions of fans of the original episodes in the Star Wars saga who can't help but secretly ask themselves: Sure, this is Star Wars, but is it my Star Wars? The original elevated moviegoers' expectations so high that it would have been impossible for any subsequent film to meet them.
When Julie Andrews sang "The hills are alive with the sound of music" from an Austrian mountaintop in 1965, the most beloved movie musical was born. To be sure, the adaptation of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II's Broadway hit has never been as universally acclaimed as, say, Singin' in the Rain. Critics argue that the songs are saccharine (even the songwriters regretted the line "To sing through the night like a lark who is learning to pray") and that the characters and plot lack the complexity that could make them more interesting.
The legend of Pocahontas and John Smith receives a luminous and essential retelling by maverick filmmaker Terrence Malick. The facts of Virginia's first white settlers, circa 1607, have been told for eons and fortified by Disney's animated films: explorer Smith (Colin Farrell) and the Native American princess (newcomer Q'orianka Kilcher) bond when the two cultures meet, a flashpoint of curiosity and war lapping interchangeably at the shores of the new continent.
Released amidst rumors of romance between costars Angelina Jolie and soon-to-be-divorced Brad Pitt, Mr. and Mrs. Smith offers automatic weapons and high explosives as the cure for marital boredom. The premise of this exhausting action-comedy (no relation to the 1941 Alfred Hitchcock comedy starring Carole Lombard and Robert Montgomery) is that the unhappily married Smiths (Pitt and Jolie) will improve their relationship once they discover their mutually-hidden identities as world-class assassins, but things get complicated when their secret-agency bosses order them to rub each other out.
The passion of mad love and the cold calculations of social climbing collide in Woody Allen's Match Point. Former tennis pro Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Velvet Goldmine) stumbles into good fortune when Chloe Hewett (Emily Mortimer, Lovely & Amazing), the daughter of a wealthy businessman, falls in love with him. But when Chris meets Nola Rice (Scarlett Johansson, Lost in Translation), a much deeper passion is stirred--and his desire isn't deterred when he discovers that Nola is already dating Chloe's brother.
Pierce Brosnan gives one of his finest performances in The Matador, a low-key buddy comedy with an agreeably sinister twist. Light-years from his former James Bond image, Brosnan is unshaven, unnerved and unpredictable as freelance assassin Julian Noble, who encounters desperate businessman Danny Wright (Greg Kinnear) in the bar of a modern Mexico City hotel. Danny is intrigued when Julian reveals that he's a "facilitator of fatalities," and his wife "Bean" (Hope Davis) is equally fascinated when Julian shows up unexpectedly, six months later, at Danny's home in Denver.
In olden days, as Cole Porter famously observed, a mere glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking. So it's heartening to report that this 1965 black comedy still delivers on its billing as "the motion picture with something to offend everyone." Tony Richardson, fresh off the liberating Tom Jones, brings Evelyn Waugh's self-described "little nightmare" to the screen with all its sacrilegious shocks (and then some!) intact, courtesy of screenwriters Terry Southern (Dr. Strangelove) and Christopher Isherwood.
