Search for Heaven

The Edge of Heaven, a film that switches back and forth between Germany and Turkey, is a drama about redemption that structurally echoes films like Babel and is a thematic cousin to some of Kieslowski's more penetrating motion pictures. Evenly div...

Welcome to the world of "Father Knows Best", white picket fences, and brilliant fall colors. Todd Haynes' Far From Heaven takes us to Hartford, Connecticut, circa 1957. However, unlike most traditional period piece dramas, the intention here isn'...

Five Minutes of Heaven is about consequences - the unintended consequences of an action that can have repercussions years or decades after an event. This material, which forms the mother lode of Five Minutes of Heaven's substance, is powerful and c...

Heaven represents the fusion of stoic contemplation with kinetic mysticism – German filmmaker Tom Tykwer's adaptation of the final screenplay by the great Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski (who wrote it with longtime partner, Krzysztof P...

With Heaven and Earth, Oliver Stone has completed his so-called "Vietnam Trilogy" - three films that examine different aspects of the war that, to this point, has provided the centerpiece of Stone's filmmaking career. The story begins in the vi...

"All the best people have bad chests and bone diseases. It's all frightfully romantic." - Juliet Hulme, Heavenly Creatures Heavenly Creatures is based on the true story of Pauline Rieper (Melanie Lynskey) and Juliet Hulme (Kate Winslet) set i...

With Just Like Heaven, director Mark Waters (Mean Girls) wants to have his cake and eat it to. That's not necessarily a bad thing, until you consider that the recipe used for this confection is missing a few ingredients and the final product is ha...

In Gladiator, director Ridley Scott transported movie audiences to the year 180 AD. Five years and four motion pictures later, the Oscar-winning director has again immersed himself in the blood and gore of hand-to-hand combat, although this time t...

In recent years, the term "director's cut" has undergone a devaluation. It has become a marketing term, appended to DVDs to enhance their salability. Often, a "director's cut" will be essentially the same as the theatrical cut, except with a fe...

One of my fears when watching movies about characters coping with cancer is that they will turn into Lifetime disease-of-the-week melodramas: shallow, plot-by-numbers chronologies of the disease's progression that become either manipulative tear-je...