The turbulent, 20-year love affair between artist Georgia O'Keeffe and photographer Alfred Steiglitz fuels some of the most important art of the 20th century. A rich, deep view of the O'Keeffe/Stieglitz relationship, primarily of its emotional toll on O'Keeffe and its spill-over onto O'Keeffe's work. Adds another dimension to O'Keeffe as a young woman artist.
Douglas Ireland is in one heck of a bind. Michael J. Fox (TV's Spin City) and Gabrielle Anwar (Scent of a Woman) star in this sparkling romantic comedy from the director of Men in Black and the producer of Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas. While he caters to the whims of the super-rich, Ireland (Fox) dreams of building his own luxury hotel and hopes that a wealthy but unscrupulous investor will help. there's one condition: Ireland must "baby-sit" the investor's beautiful young mistress (Anwar).
At the height of the 2000 election season, CBS anchor Dan Rather quipped, "The presidential race is crackling like a hickory fire." Director Jay Roach (Austin Powers) recaptures that blaze in his smart HBO docudrama about the thriller in Palm Beach County. Written by actor Danny Strong, Recount bounces between the Sunshine State, Gore's Tennessee headquarters, and Bush's Texas stomping grounds.
Bolstered by an OscarÆ-caliber performance by Philip Seymour Hoffman in the title role, Capote ranked highly among the best films of 2005. Written by actor/screenwriter Dan Futterman and based on selected chapters from the biography by Gerald Clarke, this mercilessly perceptive drama shows how Truman Capote brought about his own self-destruction in the course of writing In Cold Blood, the "nonfiction novel" that was immediately acclaimed as a literary milestone.
In the hands of maverick director Ken Russell, Altered States became a full-on sensory assault, using symbolic imagery and mind- blowing special effects to depict one man's physical and hallucinatory journey through the entire history of human evolution. It's a brazenly silly film redeemed by its intellectual ambition--a dazzling extravaganza that's in love with science and scientists, and eagerly willing to dive off the precipice of rationality to explore uncharted regions of mind, body, and spirit.
There's A Mighty Wind a-blowin', along with the gales of laughter you'll get from Christopher Guest's third exercise in brilliant "mockumentary." After tackling small-town theatricals in Waiting for Guffman and obsessive dog-show contestants in Best in Show, Guest and his reliable stable of repertory players (including Fred Willard, Parker Posey, and Bob Balaban) apply their improvisational genius to a latter-day reunion of fictional '60s-era folk singers, a comedic goldmine that Guest first explored 30 years earlier on The National Lampoon Radio Hour.
The Majestic is an old-fashioned throwback replete with a 1950s B-script and halcyon values like patriotism, true love, and clean fun. Peter Appleton (Jim Carrey) is a Hollywood scriptwriter with a sexy gal, a screenplay under his belt, and his big break on the horizon. But when his name is mistakenly given to the House Un-American Activities Committee, Appleton's dreams of success in the biz quickly unravel.
In the night skies near his Muncie, Indiana, home, power repairman Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) experiences something out of this world. His close encounter sets into action an amazing chain of events that leads to contact with benevolent aliens and their Mothership. Spectacular special effects, John Williams' outstanding score and winning performances from Dreyfuss, Teri Garr, Melinda Dillion and legendary director Francois Truffaut in the role of Lacombe make Steven Spielberg's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" movie magic of the best kind.
