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Jean Oppenheimer

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Simply Galling

The Dying Gaul offers three likable people who act appallingly

By Jean Oppenheimer
Nov 24, 2005

Deception, betrayal and revenge. In his film directorial debut, acclaimed playwright/screenwriter/theater director Craig Lucas is done in by his own script, which becomes so excessively icy and cruel that it breaks, rather than solidifies, any bond it could hope to establish with its audience. A modern-day Greek tragedy--complete with an...
Exhuming McCarthy

The Red Scare returns in Good Night, and Good Luck

By Jean Oppenheimer
Oct 13, 2005

Good Night, and Good Luck, a riveting movie that's as entertaining as it is socially and politically important, could not have come at a more propitious time. But more than just the right film at the right moment, George Clooney's sophomore directorial effort is dynamic filmmaking: brilliantly conceived, visually arresting,...
Better Mood

Wong Kar Wai delivers a sequel that far outpaces the original

By Jean Oppenheimer
Aug 25, 2005

Cineastes swooned over Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai's 2000 film In the Mood for Love, a slow-as-molasses melodrama about two tediously formal people whose spouses are having an affair with one another. Thrown together by circumstances, they find themselves falling in love but, determined not to emulate their cheating...
No Way Out

Last Days follows the final spiral of a tormented musician

By Jean Oppenheimer
Aug 11, 2005

Once you get past its negligible plot, scant dialogue and almost zero action, Gus Van Sant's elliptical rendering of the final hours in the troubled life of a grunge musician is rarely boring. That may seem like a backhanded compliment, but given the absence of such customary cinematic conventions as...
For Love of the Game

The Farrelly brothers swing straight and hit the sweet spot

By Jean Oppenheimer
Apr 7, 2005

Last year, the Simmons family of Needham, Massachusetts, just outside Boston, sent Christmas cards for the first time in more than 20 years. "We send out Xmas cards about as often as the Red Sox win the World Series," the card very cleverly proclaimed. This movie is for them. In...
Road Rules: Israel

A Nazi hunter finds tangled emotions in Walk on Water

By Jean Oppenheimer
Mar 24, 2005

Most contemporary thrillers aren't concerned with moral dilemmas; the emphasis is on action and intrigue. The Israeli film Walk on Water--which, conveniently for American audiences, is primarily in English (the rest is Hebrew and German with English subtitles)--not only raises questions about right and wrong, but also addresses issues of...
Great Clips

Tennessee schoolkids teach the world a lesson in an inspirational documentary

By Jean Oppenheimer
Feb 17, 2005

The small Appalachian community of Whitwell, Tennessee, boasts two traffic lights and a population of 1,600, nearly all of them white and Christian. Lying just 100 miles from Pulaski, where the Ku Klux Klan was founded, this town would seem an unlikely place to find a memorial to the 6...
Blade Runners

Hotel Rwanda finds hope amid the horrors of tribal genocide

By Jean Oppenheimer
Jan 6, 2005

Over a three-month period in 1994, machete-wielding Hutu tribesmen in Rwanda hacked to death 800,000 Tutsi men, women and children. News reports, including film footage of the unfolding carnage, were broadcast around the globe. In the face of such unremitting acts of inhumanity, the world community did nothing. It wasn't...