Sequels usually don’t get it for me and "threequels" are often even worse. Not so with The Bourne Ultimatum, the third movie in a series of three. If you like action thrillers this has to be the best one of the summer. Michael Phillips calls it "a breathless 115 minutes" for a very good reason. It is an action picture that treats narrative rather lightly but in the end it just works superbly.

Novelist Robert Ludlum, who wrote the trilogy about the character Jason Bourne really knows action and detail. And Bourne, an undercover CIA special agent, is perfectly typecast in this movie with Matt Damon. (The film does leave the door open for another Bourne movie but I would guess this has to be it for the series!) Agent Bourne, played adroitly by Damon as noted, is a CIA-trained assassin who is on a search mission to figure out how he was programmed and who he really was before he began killing people all over the world for the U. S. government. The Bourne Ultimatum was supposedly produced on a $130 million […]

Akeelah and the Bee (PG) is a widely acclaimed family-friendly film that everyone can enjoy. It is not only entertaining, in the very best sense of the word, it is a first-rate true story that should not be missed. How I missed it until now reveals that I didn’t think such a film would actually appeal to me, which probably tells you more about me than I should admit. But I was proven wrong, dead wrong!

This is an absorbing and happy story. An eleven-year old black girl, Akeelah Anderson (Keke Palmer), an average and unmotivated student from Crenshaw Middle School in Los Angeles, learns to believe in her herself and to value genuine intelligence through a series of touching events that will move the viewer on a deeply personal level. Akeelah’s father was killed by a shooting when she was only six and she has been deeply scared by the trials that follow as her mother (Angela Bassett) seeks to hold the family together. Akeelah seems to fear peer rejection profoundly, as do most children, thus she runs away from appearing to […]

The story of the Holocaust has been told from many many perspectives. Told from any angle, however, the human tragedy never changes. The 2002 Academy Award winning film for foreign language was Nowhere in Africa, a critically acclaimed classic. This film is the real story of a young Jewish family that fled Germany for Africa in 1938, just before Hitler and the Reich made it impossible for Jewish emigres to leave.

The narrative is one of love and family but it is deeply rooted in class, prejudice and the experience of a little girl growing up away from home who easily and quickly learns to love a remote farm in Kenya and her new African friends and culture. In contrast her parents struggle for nearly nine years to make sense of their lives and this new home. Their marriage is strained by loneliness, deep doubt, bitterness and even by at least one instance of adultery. But their love, stretched and almost destroyed, keeps drawing them back to forgiveness and the very real desire to somehow make this all work in the end. […]