WATCH NOW FLYBOYS This film is inspired by the story of the Lafayette Escadrille. During World War I, before the United States entered the war, some Americans were flying for the French military. At the time, the average life expectancy of a pilot in war was six weeks. The film explains what happened to the […]
FREEDOM WRITERS Erin Gruwell is an idealistic high school English teacher in Long Beach, California. Racial tensions are at a fever pitch after the riots that followed the arrest and beating of Rodney King. Erin tells her students about the factors that led the Nazis to scapegoat Jews for problems. When she realizes these youngsters
WATCH NOW FREQUENCY A detective son (Jim Caviezel) in New York in 1999 makes ham radio contact during an aurora borealis event with his fireman father (Dennis Quaid) in 1969. After disbelief and tech improbabilities are hastily disposed of, the son prevents his father’s premature death in a warehouse fire. That change sets up his
Friday Night Lights The game of football has long been used as a model for life lessons, and Friday Night Lights does an excellent job in that tradition. This is ultimately not a football story. Although its plot follows the true story of Permian High School in Odessa, Texas, in its march to the state
WATCH NOW G.I. JANE G.I. JANE is ostensibly about gender equality in the military, but its real intention is to glorify the “pain principle” in physical and military training If it doesn’t kill you, it’s good for you. Consider the general passion for hard gut endurance and humiliation exercises as a cure for just about
WATCH NOW THE GAME San Francisco investment banker (Michael Douglas) is a loner, a tough businessman whose heart is stuck on the bottom line. Stir him into a paranoid urban thriller in which he struggles against a conspiracy. Does the threat come from family, like his shiftless brother (Sean Penn), or from others? For some
WATCH NOW GARDEN STATE Andrew Largeman (Zach Braff), goes through life as a struggling waiter. He lives an emotionless life because he has been medicated for years by his psychiatrist father (Ian Holm), following a tragic childhood event. Andrew and his parents are estranged on every level. When Andrew learns that his mother has died,
WATCH NOW GATTACA In this future dystopia, the world is divided between the affluent and beautiful, who have genetically engineered DNA, and the riffraff, who have all the flaws. The hero (Ethan Hawke) is an inferior trying to “pass” so he can become an astronaut. He falls for an elite woman (Uma Thurman). And the
WATCH NOW GLADIATOR GLADIATOR takes us back to the hand to hand and sometimes hand to claw struggles in Rome’s Colosseum, once a fertile venue for Hollywood spectaculars, often with Christian martyr themes (Ben-Hur, The Robe). This retro $108 million epic directed by the gifted Ridley Scott (Blade Runner, Thelma and Louise) is more secular
Communist Party member Christiane (Kathrin Sass) has a heart attack near the Berlin Wall as it collapses in 1989. She is in a coma for six months, not knowing what has happened to Berlin or Communism. When she wakes, the doctor tells her son, Alex (Daniel Brühl), and daughter, Ariane (Maria Simon), that if their
