RAY (2004)

Directed by Taylor Hackford

Film based on true life story of legendary blues singer Ray Charles from the lose of his eyesight as a child, his rising career in the 1950s and 1960s, his encounters with racism, drug abuse, failed relationships and his ideas to change the pace music by combining soul and gospel music

Jamie Foxx gave one of the years outstanding performance as Ray Charles and deservedly won an Academy Award for Best Actor for his portrayal of an exceptional man who has become an American icon.

RAY also won the Academy Awards for Best Sound Mixing and was nominated in a further 5 categories including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Film Editing and Best Costume Design

DVD Special Features:

Feature Length Commentary by director Taylor Hackford

Feature Length Extended Edition

GODS AND MONSTERS (1998)

Directed by Bill Condon

Set in 1957, James Whale (Ian Mckellan), the director of Show Boat (1936), The Invisible Man (1933), Frankenstein (1931), and Bride of Frankenstein (1935), had long since stepped back from the glamor and glitz of Hollywood. A stroke triggers once buried flashes of memory of his life in Dudley, his film career, and, most influentially, the trenches during the Great War. Haunted and lonely, he recounts many of his experiences to his musclebound gardener, Clay Boone (Brendan Fraser. Despite the divide that exists between them, their friendship develops. Reliant on his sternly disapproving housemaid, Hannah (Lynn Redgrave), the flamboyant director whose time has passed sees himself slipping away, unable to stop the decline, and indulges his fantasies by coaxing Boone to model for him


Ian McKellen, in a performance that should have won him an Oscar for Best Actor (Condon did win for Best Adapted Screenplay) and the film was also nominated in the category of Best Actress for Lynn Redgrave
Ian Mckellan handles Whale with grace and humor, as a man whose love of beauty compensates for a lingering trauma, a terror of man's innate brutality. The film would be merely a showpiece however, a star turn for its lead actor, if the script did not successfully balance Whale's story with those of Clay Boone and Hannah. Brendan Fraser competently handles Boone's growing realization, like Frankenstein's monster, that he has a soul. Lynn Redgrave undergoes a remarkable transformation as the repressed Hannah, the flip-side of the hysterical housekeeper Minnie (the incomparable Una O'Connor) in Bride.

DVD Special Features:

None

GIRL, INTERRUPTED (1999)

Directed by James Mangold

Film based on writer Susanna Kaysen's (Winona Ryder) account of her 18-month stay at a mental hospital in the 1960s
Rushed to the hospital after a suicide attempt, she discusses this with a psychiatrist that she had been having some delusions. She had also been having an affair with the husband of her parents' friend. The doctor suggests that combining a bottle of aspirin and a bottle of vodka was a suicide attempt which she denies. He recommends a short period of rest at Claymoore, a private mental hospital. The girls, Georgina is a pathological liar, Polly has been badly scarred by fire, Daisy won't eat in the presence of other people and Lisa (Angelina Jolie) is a sociopath - the biggest exasperation for the staff - like Nurse Valerie (Whoopi Goldberg) and the biggest influence on the other girls in the hospital.

'Girl, Interrupted' achieves a very rare victory in modern film. It conjures enough unnerving insight to bring us scintilatingly close to its most macabre moments; while sewing atop this a spiritual safety net. One capable of the mental restoration that must bring us back to the security of our well cushioned theatre seat. All movement in between remains internal; a lingering memory of personal identification and cathartic resolution.

It is a testament to this Miss Jolie's presence that even as dark and soul sickened and gloriously decaying as her character is, there is not a frame in this film that doesn't feel her infection
One look into Angelina Jolie's eyes and you will see the warm, jaundiced decay of a soul no longer battling with sanity.

Angelina Jolie won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress having been the frontrunner throughout the season

DVD Special Features:

None

THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY (1995)

Directed by Clint Eastwood

The film is set in the summer of 1965. It tells the story of Francesca (Meryl Streep), a lonely Italian Iowa housewife. While her husband and children are away at the Illinois State Fair, she meets and falls in love with a photographer, Robert kincaid (Clint Eastwood) who has come to Madison County, Iowa to create a photographic essay for National Geographic on the covered bridges in the area. The four days they spend together are a turning point in her life and she writes of her experience in a diary which is discovered by her children after her death.

As an acting showcase, this is one of Streep's great performances. As Francesca, the woman who finds in Eastwood's photographer Robert the one great passion in her life albeit briefly and at a time when the likelihood of such a thing happening was remote indeed, Streep is extraordinary. Sometimes she can overwhelm a project; her versatility doesn't always work in favour of lesser material. But here she seems to have tapped quite effortlessly, not just into the consciousness of her character, but into her very soul as well.

Bridges earned Meryl Streep her 10th Academy Award nomination - Best Actress. She has earned 4 more to date and is the Academy's most nominated actress

DVD Special Features:

None

ABOUT SCHMIDT (2002)

Directed by Alexander Payne

Warren Schmidt is forced to deal with an ambiguous future as he enters retirement. Soon after, his wife dies and he must come to terms with his daughter's marriage to a man he does not care for and the failure that his life has become

Continuing my series on ACTING GIANTS for the anniversary of the Academy's 80th year, I have picked this film which shows that Nicholson is able to act against the usual types we have associated with him over the years. We are used to him as grinning alpha male with pointed irony and sarcasm. But in the role of Warren Schmidt, Jack successfully convinces us that a full life should be the goal instead of just living though the years. He opens our mind to the deep vacuum of a person forced to evaluate their lives by sudden events.

ABOUT SCHMIDT was nominated for 2 Academy Awards, Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress

DVD Special Features:

None

AS GOOD AS IT GETS (1997)

Directed by James L. Brooks

The trials and tribulations of a compulsive writer, Melvin Udall (Jack Nicholson). After his homosexual neighbor (Greg Kinnear) is brutally beaten, he is entrusted to the care of the neighbor's dog, with a difficult relationship with a waitress (Helen Hunt) to add on top of that. What develops is a weekend trip/triangle between these three individuals, and together they learn the true meaning of "the sunny side of life".

Nominated for 7 Academy Awards, Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress, Best Original Screenplay, Best Original Comedy Score and Best Film Editing

Won, 2, Best Actor and Best Actress making it one of only 5 films to have accomplished this in the Academy's history

The others were:

IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT (1934)
ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST (1975)
ON GOLDEN POND (1980)
THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991)

DVD Special Features:

None

SUMMER BREAK....

I would be starting a new series to commemorate the 80th Anniversary of the Academy Awards titled: OSCAR'S ACTING GIANTS
in which several films starring Academy Award winners and nominees will be selected, reviewed and blogged

HOWARDS END (1993)

Directed by James Ivory

Encounter of three social classes of the England at the beginning of the century : the victorian capitalists (the Wilcoxes) considering themselves as aristocrats, whose only god is money ; the enlightened bourgeois (the Schlegels), humanistic and philanthropist ; and the workers (the Basts), fighting to survive. The Schlegel sisters' humanism will be torn apart as they try both to softly knock down the Wilcox's prejudices and to help the Basts

Nominated for 9 Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Art/Set Decoration, Best Oginal Score and Best Costume Design

Won 3, Best Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Art/Set Decoration

Until 2007's win by Helen Mirren (The Queen), Emma Thompson was the last British Winner of the Best Actress Academy Award

DVD Special Features

None

Z (1969)

Directed by Costa-Gavras

Costa-Gavras chronicles the overthrow of the democratic government in Greece. When a liberal politician is murdered in an attack during a peace demonstration, the right wing established figures in the military and the police try and hide not only their parts in it, but try to cover up the murder as well. The prosecutor must act as a detective in order to go through the cover up. While historically accurate, it is told as a combination mystery and thriller.

Nominated for 5 Academy Awards, Best Picture, Best Foreign Language Film, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Film Editing

Won, 2, Best Foreign Language Film(Algeria) and Best Film Editing

DVD Special Features

THE QUEEN (2006)

Directed by Stephen Frears

Using a superb script by Peter Morgan, Stephen Frears details the time from the election of Labour Party Prime Minister Tony Blair (Michael Sheen) to that momentous international outpouring of grief and love that followed the tragic death of Princess Di in 1997, showing the bifurcation of response between the Royals and the People as represented by Blair. Instead of the insensitive cold figure that the world witnessed as Queen Elizabeth II, Mirren shows us that the woman who is Queen actually had feelings for her grandchildren, a respect for her station as royalty, and was gradually responsive to the cry of the people via Blair's influence, allowing the world to pay proper tribute to a heroine. The ogres in the Balmoral Castle were in fact Prince Phillip (James Cromwell) and the Queen Mum (Sylvia Syms) abetted by the very proper Robin Janvrin (Roger Allam) and Diana's ex husband, The Prince of Wales, (Alex Jennings).

Nominated for 6 Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Original Screenplay, Best Original Score and Best Costume Design

Helen Mirren won every single accolade of the season leading up to the Academy Award for Best Actress

DVD Special Features:

The Making of The Queen

Audio Commentary with Director, Stephen Frears and Writer, Peter Morgan

Audio Commentary with British Historian and Royal Expert, Robert Lacey, Author of Majesty

THE PIANO (1993)

Directed by Jane Campion

It is the mid-nineteenth century. Ada (Holly Hunter)is a mute who has a young daughter, Flora (Anna Paquin). In an arranged marriage she leaves her native Scotland accompanied by her daughter and her beloved piano. Life in the rugged forests of New Zealand's South Island is not all she may have imagined and nor is her relationship with her new husband Stewart (Sam Neil). She suffers torment and loss when Stewart sells her piano to a neighbour, George (Harvey Keitel). Ada learns from George that she may earn back her piano by giving him piano lessons, but only with certain other conditions attached. At first Ada despises George but slowly their relationship is transformed and this propels them into a dire situation.

Nominated for 8 Academy Awards, Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress, Best Original Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing and Best Costume Design

Won 3, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress and Best Original Screenplay

DVD Special Features:

None

THE MISSION (1986)

Directed by Roland Joffe

Father Gabriel (Jeremy Irons) ascends the mountains of Brazil to bring christianity to the natives. He is successful and brings about a golden age among them. Mendoza (Robert De Niro), a slave buyer and Mercenery, kills his brother in a fit of rage, and only Fr. Gabriel's guidance prevents his suicide. Gabriel brings Mendoza to work at his mission with the natives, and Mendoza finds peace and asks to become a priest. The church , under pressure, cedes the land to the Portuguese which will allow slavers in again. Mendoza breaks his vows and organizes the natives to resist while Gabriel warns him to help them as a priest.

Nominated for 7 Academy Awards, Best Picture, Best Director, Best Cinematography, Best Art/Set Decoration, Best Original Score and Best Costume Design

Won 1, Best Cinematography

DVD Special Features:

None

VOLVER (2006)

Directed by Pedro Almodovar

Raimunda (Penelope Cruz) lives in Madrid with her daughter Paula (Yohana Cobo) and her husband Paco (Antonio de la Torre), who is always drunk. Her sister, Sole (Lola Dueńas), is separated and works clandestinely as a hairstylist for women. The two sisters lost their parents in a fire in La Mancha, their birth village, years ago. Their aunt, Paula (Chus Lampreave), still lives in the village and continues to speak about her sister Irene (Carmen Maura), mother of the two sisters, as if she were still alive. When the old aunt dies the situation changes and the past returns(volver) in a twist of mystery and suspense

Nominated for 1 Academy Award, Best Actress

DVD Special Features:

None

MAR ADENTRO (2004) (THE SEA INSIDE)

Directed by Alejandro Amenábar

In Spain, the former sailor Ramón Sampedro (Javier Bardem) has been quadriplegic for twenty-eight years and is fighting in court for his right of practicing euthanasia through an association that defends the freedom of choice and leaded by his friend Géne (Clara Segura). Ramón is introduced to the lawyer that is defending his cause, Julia (Belén Rueda), who has a degenerative fatal disease; and meets Rosa (Lola Dueñas), a lonely worker that has been abused by men. Their relationship changes the behavior and viewpoint of life of Rosa and Julia.

Nominated for 2 Academy Awards, Best Foreign Film and Best Achievement in Makeup

Won 1, Best Foreign Film

DVD Special Features:

None

HISTORIA OFICIAL, LA (1985) (THE OFFICIAL STORY)

Directed by Luis Puenzo

This story, based on real events that took place in Argentina, looks at a married couple torn apart by the campaign of killings and torture that sent thousands of accused political leftists to unmarked graves in the mid 1970s known as the Dirty War.
The story begins when Alicia (Norma Aleandro), a high school teacher and, Roberto (Hector Alterio), a wealthy businessman, adopt a little girl named Gaby (Analia Castro). After five years Alicia wonders about the parents of Gaby, a topic her husband has told her to forget as it was a condition of the adoption. Yet, he knows the ugly story of his daughter's adoption.
While hard to believe, Alicia, and others in Argentina, is not aware of how much killing and suffering has gone on in the country until the students where she teaches begin to complain that the "government approved" history books they read were written by government "assassins."
At this time she also has a long conversation with Ana (Chunchuna Villafane), an old friend, who had been in exile in Europe after she was tortured by paramilitary forces loyal to the brutal Argentine government. Alicia begins to do some serious political and personal research on her own.
She discovers the identity of Gaby's dead parents and finds out that her husband had a hand in the government nasty repression and has intensive dealings with foreign business interests. Alicia also learns the identity of the girl's grandmother (Chela Ruiz)

Nominated for 2 Academy Awards, Best Foreign Film and Best Writing (Written directly for the Screen)

Won Best Foreign Film

DVD Special Features:

None

NOTES ON A SCANDAL (2006)

Directed by Richard Eyre

Film based on Zoe Heller's novel in which Barbara Covett, (Dame Judi Dench) is a veteran and cynical schoolteacher who is close to retirement. She is barely tolerated by her less brilliant and acerbic colleagues who know nothing about her private life which consists mainly of taking care of Portia, her aging cat, and spending countless hours alone. The only means she has found to take the edge off her desperate loneliness is writing in her journal. When Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett), a younger, attractive woman, joins the faculty as an art teacher, Barbara watches her from afar and has nothing but caustic things to say in her diary about her clothing and her care-free manner. Mayhem ensues when Barbara cynically tells a bessotted fellow teacher that Sheba is had a sexual liaison with an underage student, Andrew Connolly (Andrew Simpson)

Nominated for 4 Academy Awards, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Original Score

DVD Special Features:

None

LEBEN DER ANDEREN, DAS (2006)
(THE LIVES OF OTHERS)

Directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck

Film focuses on the horrifying, sometimes unintentionally funny system of observation in the former East Germany. In the early 1980s, the successful dramatist Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) and his longtime companion Christa-Maria Sieland (Marina Gedeck), a popular actress, are big intellectual stars in the socialist state, although they secretly don't always think loyal to the party line. One day, the Minister of Culture becomes interested in Christa, so the secret service agent Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) is instructed to observe and sound out the couple, but their life fascinates him more and more

Won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film

DVD Special Features:

None

THE DEPARTED (2006)

WINNER OF THE ACADEMY AWARD FOR BEST PICTURE

Directed by Martin Scorcese


In South Boston, the state police force is waging war on Irish-American organized crime. Young undercover cop Billy Costigan (Leodardo Dicaprio) is assigned to infiltrate the mob syndicate run by gangland chief Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson). While Billy quickly gains Costello's confidence, Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon), a hardened young criminal who has infiltrated the police department as an informer for the syndicate, is rising to a position of power in the Special Investigation Unit. Each man becomes deeply consumed by his double life, gathering information about the plans and counter-plans of the operations he has penetrated. But when it becomes clear to both the mob and the police that there's a mole in their midst, Billy and Colin are suddenly in danger of being caught and exposed to the enemy-and each must race to uncover the identity of the other man in time to save himself.

Nominated for 5 Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Film Editing

Won 4, Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Film Editing

After 5 Nominations for Directing and 2 for Writing, Martin Scorcese finally received the long denied Academy Award for Best Director.

It was also the first time a Scorcese directed film will win the Academy Award for Best Picture

DVD Special Features:


Two Documentaries:

Crossing Criminal Cultures

Stranger Than Fiction:

Additional Scenes Cut from the Movie

A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE (1951)

Directed by Elia Kazan

Set in the French Quarter of New Orleans during the restless years following World War Two, A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE is the story of Blanche DuBois (Vivien Leigh), a fragile and neurotic woman on a desperate prowl for someplace in the world to call her own. After being exiled from her hometown of Auriol, Mississippi for seducing a seventeen-year-old boy at the school where she taught English, Blanche explains her unexpected appearance on Stanley (marlon Brando) and Stella's (Kim Hunter), Blanche's sister doorstep as nervous exhaustion. This, she claims, is the result of a series of financial calamities which have recently claimed the family plantation, Belle Reve. Suspicious, Stanley points out that "under Louisiana's Napoleonic code what belongs to the wife belongs to the husband." Stanley, a sinewy and brutish man, is as territorial as a panther. He tells Blanche he doesn't like to be swindled and demands to see the bill of sale. This encounter defines Stanley and Blanche's relationship. They are opposing camps and Stella is caught in no-man's-land. But Stanley and Stella are deeply in love. Blanche's efforts to impose herself between them only enrages the animal inside Stanley. When Mitch -- a card-playing buddy of Stanley's -- arrives on the scene, Blanche begins to see a way out of her predicament. Mitch, himself alone in the world, reveres Blanche as a beautiful and refined woman. Yet, as rumors of Blanche's past in Auriol begin to catch up to her, her circumstances become unbearable

Nominated for 12 Academy Awards, Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Writing (Screenplay), Best Cinematography (Black and White), Best Art/ Set Decoration (Black and White), Best Costume Design (Black and White), Best Scoring of a Comedy or Dramatic Picture and Best Sound Recording

Won 4, Best Actress, Best Supprting Actor, Best Supporting Actress and Best Art/Set decoration (Black and White)

Created Oscar history winning three of the four acting nominations, the only film to have done since

Widely tipped to sweep the board at the Academy Awards that year, Streetcar lost its nominations for Best Director and Picture, the former was won by George Stevens for A PLACE IN THE SUN and the latter by the musical, AN AMERICAN IN PARIS

DVD Special Features:

Feature Length Commentary by Karl Malden and Film Historians, Rudy Behlmer and Jeff Young

Marlon Brando Screen Test

Profile on Director, Elia Kazan: A Director's Journey

Five Documentaries:

A Streetcar on Broadway,
A Streetcar in Hollywood,
Censorship and Desire,
North and the Music of the South
An Actor Named Brando

TWO WOMEN (LA CIOCIARA) (1960)

Directed by Vittorio De Sica

Cesira (Sophia Loren) and her 13-year-old daughter, Rosetta (Eleonara Brown), flee from the allied bombs in Rome during the second world war. They travel to the village where Cesira was born. During their journey and in the village, the mother does everything to protect Rosetta. However, on one occasion they both get raped by soldiers hiding in a church. This cruel event is too much for the always powerful fighting Cesira and she suffers from a breakdown. During their stay in the village, a young intellectual, Michele (Jean Paul Belmondo) falls in love with Cesira who does not know how to reply to the advances of such a gentleman

Nominated/Won for 1 Academy Award, Best Actress

Sophia Loren made Academy history as the first perfomer to win an Oscar for a none english speaking part.

To date there have only been two others, Robert De Niro won Best Supporting Actor for THE GODFATHER PART 2 in 1974 and Roberto Benigni won Best Actor for 1998's LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL

DVD Special Features:

None

A BEAUTIFUL MIND (2001)

WINNER OF THE ACADEMY AWARD FOR BEST PICTURE

Directed by Ron Howard

At Princeton University, John Nash (Russell Crowe) struggles to make a worthwhile contribution to serve as his legacy to the world of mathematics. He finally makes a revolutionary breakthrough that will eventually earn him the Nobel Prize. After graduate school he turns to teaching, becoming romantically involved with his student Alicia (Jennifer Connelly). Meanwhile the government asks his help with breaking Soviet codes, which soon gets him involved in a terrifying conspiracy plot. Nash grows more and more paranoid until a discovery that turns his entire world upside down. Now it is only with Alicia's help that he will be able to recover his mental strength and regain his status as the great mathematician we know him as today.

Nominated for 8 Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Editing, Best Makeup and Best Original Score

Won 4, Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actress and Best Adapted Screenplay

DVD Special Features:

Feature Length Commentary by Director, Ron Howard

Feature Length Commentary by Screenwriter, Akiva Goldsman

GASLIGHT (1944)

Directed by George Cukor

In London, at Thorton Square 9, the prima donna Alice Alquist is strangled and her famous jewels miss. Her young niece Paula (Ingrid Bergman) is sent to Italy to study music and the house stays empty. Ten years later, Paula decides to get married with the older pianist Gregory Anton (Charles Boyer), who convinces her to move back to the old address in London. When they arrive, Paula finds a letter from a mysterious and unknown Sergis Bauer, making Gregory upset. He psychologically begins to torture Paula and she has a nervous breakdown, insecurity and memory problems. When the Scotland Yard policeman Brian Cameron (Joseph Cotten) sees Gregory Anton [the couple] in a tourist place, he immediately recognizes Gregory [he see Paula who reminds him of her aunt; he does not know Gregory] and decides to investigate and find evidences to connect Gregory with the unsolved murder, while Paula is being driven mad and menaced of being interned in an asylum by her husband.

Nominated for 5 Academy Awards, Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress, Best Writing (Screenplay) and Best Art/Set Decoration (Black and White)

Won 2, Best Actress and Best Art/Set Decoration (Black and White)

DVD Special Features:

None