THE CONSTANT GARDENER is a thriller with a conscience and a romantic streak, both equally memorable. The DVD of it is memorable for what it doesn’t have: a commentary track. One could speculate endlessly about why that is, or one can move on to the bonus features that are available, including the usual deleted and… Read More »
VANTAGE POINT
VANTAGE POINT takes a storyline that is a middling throwback to the Cold War paranoid fantasies of a half-century ago and tries to jazz it up with a multi-view narrative. The device makes the most of doing the requisite slow reveal of exactly what happened before, during, and after a terrorist attack in Spain, but… Read More »
Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck Observes THE LIVES OF OTHERS (Das Leben der Anderen)
Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck had always been fascinated by the Stasi, the East German secret police who took spying on the public to an almost absurd extreme. During his meticulous research about them for THE LIVES OF OTHERS, he became something of an expert on their procedures, consulting not only scholarly experts, but also by including on his… Read More »
John Madden Pays THE DEBT
When tapped to direct THE DEBT, John Madden had not seen HA HOV, the Israeli film on which it is based. When he read the script, he decided he wanted to see the original, but only once. The re-make follows the same general outlines, but Madden emphasized that it is its own entity, distinct and with… Read More »