Edwina Carroll Movies

A mind-bending sci-fi symphony, Stanley Kubrick's landmark 1968 epic pushed the limits of narrative and special effects toward a meditation on technology and humanity. Based on Arthur C. Clarke's story The Sentinel, Kubrick and Clarke's screenplay is structured in four movements. At the "Dawn of Man," a group of hominids encounters a mysterious black monolith alien to their surroundings. To the strains of Strauss's 1896 Also sprach Zarathustra, a hominid invents the first weapon, using a bone to kill prey. As the hominid tosses the bone in the air, Kubrick cuts to a 21st century spacecraft hovering over the Earth, skipping ahead millions of years in technological development. U.S. scientist Dr. Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester) travels to the moon to check out the discovery of a strange object on the moon's surface: a black monolith. As the sun's rays strike the stone, however, it emits a piercing, deafening sound that fills the investigators' headphones and stops them in their path.

Cutting ahead 18 months, impassive astronauts David Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) head toward Jupiter on the spaceship Discovery, their only company three hibernating astronauts and the vocal, man-made HAL 9000 computer running the entire ship. When the all-too-human HAL malfunctions, however, he tries to murder the astronauts to cover his error, forcing Bowman to defend himself the only way he can. Free of HAL, and finally informed of the voyage's purpose by a recording from Floyd, Bowman journeys to "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite," through the psychedelic slit-scan star-gate to an 18th century room, and the completion of the monolith's evolutionary mission.

With assistance from special-effects expert Douglas Trumbull, Kubrick spent over two years meticulously creating the most "realistic" depictions of outer space ever seen, greatly advancing cinematic technology for a story expressing grave doubts about technology itself. Despite some initial critical reservations that it was too long and too dull, 2001 became one of the most popular films of 1968, underlining the generation gap between young moviegoers who wanted to see something new and challenging and oldsters who "didn't get it." Provocatively billed as "the ultimate trip," 2001 quickly caught on with a counterculture youth audience open to a contemplative (i.e. chemically enhanced) viewing experience of a film suggesting that the way to enlightenment was to free one's mind of the U.S. military-industrial-technological complex. ~ Lucia Bozzola, Rovi

The internationally produced historical epic Genghis Khan sometimes wavers uncertainly between spectacle and self-parody. Though Omar Sharif essays the title role, top billing is bestowed upon Stephen Boyd as Genghis Khan's mentor-turned-enemy Jamuga. It's hard to generate audience sympathy for a Mongolian leader who laid waste to much of the civilized world, but Sharif manages to pull it off. While the battle scenes are impressive, the most memorable sequence involves an outsized fireworks display (which turns out to be a clever bit of military strategy). James Mason is amusing as an epigrammatic Chinese leader, Eli Wallach is appropriately hissable as the film's main villain, and the late Francoise Dorleac is decorative as the romantic bone of contention between Genghis Khan and Jamuga. Most of the film was lensed in Yugoslavia, a country that served as a generic location for many a historical pageant of the 1960s and 1970s. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

In this detective film, a Chinese detective breaks up a drug smuggling ring and tries to find the "Daffodil Killer." The drug smugglers had devised the ingenious method of smuggling heroin from Hong Kong in the stems of daffodils. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

The scene is Burma during World War II. A small British brigade led by Stanley Baker comes upon a Burmese village controlled by the Japanese. The brigade wipes out the enemy, whereupon Baker discovers that the late Japanese commandant has a coded map secreted on his person. When a Burmese prisoner who can decode the map refuses to talk, Baker orders that two peaceful villagers be executed. Baker's actions seem cruel and extreme until it becomes apparent that the enemy is twice as ruthless as he. Based on a TV play by Peter R. Newman, Yesterday's Enemy is a brutal but insightful look at the blurred line between good and evil in wartime conditions. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi