Chandler Williams Movies
Based on author Bryan Burrough's ambitious tome Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-43, director Michael Mann's sprawling historical crime drama follows the efforts of top FBI agent Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale ) in capturing notorious bank robber John Dillinger. A folk hero to the American public thanks to his penchant for robbing the banks that many people believed responsible for the Great Depression, charming bandit Dillinger (Johnny Depp) was virtually unstoppable at the height of his criminal career; no jail could hold him, and his exploits endeared him to the common people while making headlines across the country. J. Edgar Hoover's (Billy Crudup) FBI was just coming into formation, and what better way for the ambitious lawman to transform his fledgling Bureau of Investigation into a national police force than to capture the gang that always gets away? Determined to bust Dillinger and his crew, which also included sociopathic Baby Face Nelson (Stephen Graham) and Alvin Karpis (Giovanni Ribisi), Hoover christened Dillinger the country's very first Public Enemy Number One, and unleashed Purvis to take them down by whatever means necessary. But Purvis underestimated Dillinger's ingenuity as a master criminal, and after embarking on a frantic series of chases and shoot-outs, the dashing agent humbly surmised that he was in over his head. Outwitted and outgunned, Purvis knew that his only hope for busting Dillinger's gang was to baptize a crew of Western ex-lawmen as official agents, and orchestrate a series of betrayals so cunning that even America's criminal mastermind wouldn't know what hit him. Marion Cotillard, Channing Tatum, and Stephen Dorff co-star. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Johnny Depp, Christian Bale, (more)
When a whistle-blowing executive at an international energy firm prepares to expose his company's corrupt practices in Latin America, he secretly hires a private detective to track his every move for fear that he will be killed for his bold transgression. Jimmy Stevens (Frank Langella) has had enough of the lies and deception, and now he's going to something about it. He also knows that chances are good he'll pay the ultimate price for doing what he's about to do, so as a form of insurance Jimmy hires private detective Frank Turlotte (Elliott Gould) to keep a close tab on him. But Frank doesn't realize that the man who hired him and the man he was told to trail are one in the same, and as the paths of the two men begin to intertwine, the secrets of the past offer clues to the mysteries of the future. Mulholland Drive star Laura Harring co-stars in a twisting neo-noir thriller from A Hole in One director Richard Ledes. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Frank Langella, Elliott Gould, (more)
A handful of New Yorkers find their paths crossing in ways that force them to examine their lives in this contemporary drama produced by Ismail Merchant. Isabel (Elizabeth Banks) is a twentysomething photographer who is supposed to marry her boyfriend, Jonathan (James Marsden), in a month. But Isabel has found herself wondering if marriage is the right thing for her. Meanwhile, her mother, Diana (Glenn Close), a well-known film actress, has learned her husband has been seeing another woman, and while they have an open relationship, Diana finds this hurtful. Over the course of the day, Diana meets Alec (Jesse Bradford), a handsome young actor, and Isabel is introduced to Peter (John Light), a journalist, and both women begin to question their current relationships. The first feature for director Chris Terrio, Heights also stars Michael Murphy, Eric Bogosian, Thomas Lennon, and Rufus Wainwright. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Glenn Close, Elizabeth Banks, (more)
Alfred Kinsey was an entomologist who taught at Indiana University and had a keen interest in an area of human behavior that had seen little scholarly research -- human sexuality. While the courtship and reproductive patterns of animals had been carefully documented, Kinsey believed that most "established facts" about human sexual behavior were a matter of conjecture rather than research and that what most people said about their sex lives was not born out by the evidence (a subject that had personal resonance for him given the troubles he and his wife Clara Kinsey had in the early days of their marriage). After introducing a course in "Marriage" at Indiana University which offered frank and factual information on sex to students, Kinsey began an exhaustive series of interviews with a wide variety of people from all walks of life in order to find out the truth about sex practices in America. When he published Sexual Behavior and the Human Male in 1948, his findings were wildly controversial, indicating that most men had a wider variety of sexual experiences than most people imagined, including a number of practices commonly thought to be dangerous or perverted (including pre-marital sex, same-sex contacts, and masturbation). An even greater outcry greeted Kinsey's next volume, Sexual Behavior and the Human Female, which contradicted common notions than most women went into marriage sexually inexperienced. Kinsey is a film biography written and directed by Bill Condon which examines Kinsey's life and work from his strict childhood until his death in 1956. Liam Neeson plays Alfred Kinsey, and Laura Linney co-stars as Kinsey's wife and colleague Clara. John Lithgow highlights the supporting cast as Kinsey's repressed and moralistic father, while Chris O'Donnell, Peter Sarsgaard, and Timothy Hutton play members of Kinsey's research team and Tim Curry appears as an IU faculty member at odds with Kinsey's teachings. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Liam Neeson, Laura Linney, (more)
