Email Author Jean Oppenheimer

2005 Stories by Jean Oppenheimer

• Simply Galling

  published November 30, 2005

  Deception, betrayal and revenge. In his film directorial debut, acclaimed playwright/ screenwriter/theater director Craig Lucas is done in by his... More >>

• Exhuming McCarthy

  published October 19, 2005

  Good Night, and Good Luck, a riveting movie that's as entertaining as it is socially and politically important, could not have come... More >>

• Truth Syrup

  published October 19, 2005

  It's the cover-up, stupid! It doomed Nixon during Watergate, got Clinton impeached, inspired outrage against the Catholic Church, and apparently... More >>

• The Face of Terror

  published October 12, 2005

  One of the strongest -- and sure to be controversial -- films of the year, The War Within goes places that other films wouldn't dare... More >>

• Artful Dodging

  published September 28, 2005

  It's almost impossible to watch Roman Polanski's rendition of Oliver Twist without drawing parallels between the deprivations... More >>

• Better Mood

  published September 7, 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... More >>

• No Way Out

  published August 24, 2005

  Once you get past its negligible plot, scant dialogue and almost nonexistent action, Gus Van Sant's elliptical rendering of the final hours in the... More >>

• Bird Droppings

  published August 17, 2005

  Even today, British kids grow up listening to stories about life during the London Blitz and the hardships their parents and grandparents endured... More >>

• Mostly Miranda

  published July 20, 2005

  Me and You and Everyone We Know, the new film from writer/director/performance artist Miranda July, walked off with prizes at both... More >>

• Follow the Music

  published July 20, 2005

  Thomas Seyr, the central figure in director Jacques Audiard's kinetically charged new film The Beat That My Heart Skipped, is a... More >>

• In Saddam's Shadow

  published June 8, 2005

  Perhaps no filmmaker working today better exemplifies the great humanist tradition of Italian Neo-Realism than the gifted Kurdish-Iranian director... More >>

• Wax Off

  published May 4, 2005

  The new House of Wax -- a remake, pretty much in name only, of the 1953 Vincent Price movie (itself a remake of a 1933 film) --... More >>

• Great Clips

  published May 4, 2005

  The small Appalachian community of Whitwell, Tennessee, boasts two traffic lights and a population of 1,600, nearly all of them white and... More >>

• Road Rules: Israel

  published April 27, 2005

  Most contemporary thrillers aren't concerned with moral dilemmas; the emphasis is on action and intrigue. The Israeli film Walk on... More >>

• For Love of the Game

  published April 6, 2005

  Last year the Simmons family of Needham, Massachusetts, just outside Boston, sent Christmas cards for the first time in more than twenty years.... More >>

• The Kids Aren't Alright

  published March 23, 2005

  Don't let the PG-13 rating fool you. Though it's acted almost completely by children, Nobody Knows is not a film for kids. A... More >>

• Cute Is Enough

  published February 9, 2005

  For those viewers hailing from the lucrative under-six demographic, Pooh's Heffalump Movie will prove to be a suitably sweet... More >>

• Blade Runners

  published January 12, 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,... More >>

• Horse Senseless

  published January 12, 2005

  An underappreciated art, vocal performance can make or break an animated film, as well as a live-action movies that "stars" talking animals. It's... More >>