WATCH NOW THE DARK KNIGHT Gotham City has made great strides against the mob since Batman Begins (2005), thanks to Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart, Erin Brockovich), the new district attorney, who has Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal, Mona Lisa Smile) at his side. Rachel, an assistant district attorney, is the former girlfriend of Bruce Wayne. As […]
WATCH NOW THE DEEP END OF THE OCEAN is an intriguing new take on several eternal themes in literature. One is mother love, another is the returned captive. In this gripping adaptation of the Jacqueline Mitchard novel, a young suburban matron (Michelle Pfeiffer) loses her three year old son in a crowded Chicago hotel lobby.
WATCH NOW THE DEPARTED Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, “Evermore in this world is this marvelous balance of beauty and disgust, magnificence and rats.” This film is a testament to just how infested human societies can become with rats, both large and small, old and young. Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) is an Irish-American crime boss
WATCH NOW THE DISH In this bright comedy from Australia, The Dish is a real object, a humongous 1,000-ton radio telescope, one of the most powerful in the world, built somewhat incongruously on the edge of remote Parkes, New South Wales, in the middle of a sheep paddock. In 1969, the scientists who run it
WATCH NOW THE DEVIL’S OWN is a humane thriller based on the idea that a law-abiding American-Catholic policeman offers room and board to a young Irish immigrant who is actually a fugitive I.R.A. revolutionary. Both actors (Harrison Ford as the cop, Brad Pitt as the stranger) are loaded with charisma. Pitt’s character has killed 24
DOGMA Kevin Smith’s “comic fantasy” about angels and demons in contemporary New Jersey is mostly an excuse for him to vent about the Church and many of its rules. Smith, 29, is a budding talent with a couple of low budget hits (Clerks, Chasing Amy). He can’t be accused of anti Catholicism because he is
WATCH NOW Donnie Brasco The hero in this film is really a cop who pretends to join the Mob to get otherwise unavailable evidence. “Brasco” happens to be the assumed name of real-life F.B.I. agent Joseph Pistone, whose book provided the basis for this superb screenplay by Paul Attanasio (Quiz Show). The serious Mob movie
WATCH NOW Like watching a car try to beat a train across the tracks and failing The Day of the Dolphin is a jaw-dropping disaster that you can’t turn away from. Fortunately, this one is caught on film for posterity. If you’re unfamiliar with the movie, you won’t believe it’s really about this until you
WATCH NOW ENEMY AT THE GATES: The first scenes in this epic, set during the 1942-43 Battle of Stalingrad, are horrifying in the grand and artful sense a depiction of war and chaos that arouses compassion for those who endured or died. These scenes resemble the storming-of-Normandy sequences at the start of Saving Private Ryan.
WATCH NOW It’s awfully long, but The Day of the Jackal (which inspired a remake almost 25 years later) is a terribly compelling look at the machinations of an assassin and the military/police machinations that must occur in order to apprehend him. Or, more to the point, the machinations of 1973, before the dawn of
