David Bennent Movies

Five-star German director Volker Schlondorff (The Tin Drum, Swann in Love) helms the deliberately-paced existential drama Ulzhat, from a script authored by the famed Jean-Claude Carriere (The Mahabharata). As the film opens, world-weary Parisian schoolteacher Charles Simon (Philippe Torreton) leaves the City of Lights, hits the road and drives east, intentions and destination undeclared. Soon after Charles crosses the Kazakhstani border and his car runs out of gas, he climbs out of the vehicle and begins walking, refusing each driver who stops and offers a ride. In time, it becomes apparent that he is journeying to Khan Tengri, a mountain in Asia, regarded by many shamans as a holy ground - not for spiritual enlightenment, as might be expected, but to find a rumored cache of gold. Though the traveler practically insists on journeying alone (for obvious reasons), he is soon joined in his quest by two eccentrics: a Kazakhstani woman named Ulzhat, who teaches French at a local village school, and Shakuni (David Bennent of The Tin Drum), a hippie-turned-shaman from western Europe. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi

This lavishly staged and costumed fantasy is about young Jack (Tom Cruise) and his lady love Princess Lili (Mia Sara), and how Jack battles Darkness (Tim Curry) to save both the Princess and the world. When the peasant Jack takes Princess Lili to see the unicorns, the strongest animals around, he does not know that Darkness, with his cloven hooves, yellow eyes, and red skin plans on using Lili as bait to weaken the unicorns which he does -- and plunge the world into an ice age. Soon after that disaster, Darkness captures Lili and, Jack has to rally his elves and elvettes to rescue her and subdue Darkness at the same time. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

In Volker Schlöndorff's award-winning adaptation of Nobel Prize winner Günter Grass' allegorical novel, David Bennent plays Oskar, the young son of a German rural family, circa 1925. On his third birthday, Oskar receives a shiny new tin drum. At this point, rather than mature into one of the miserable specimens of grown-up humanity that he sees around him, he vows never to get any older or any bigger. Whenever the world around him becomes too much to bear, the boy begins to hammer on his drum; should anyone try to take the toy away from him, he emits an ear-piercing scream that literally shatters glass. As Germany goes to hell during the 1930s and '40s, the never-aging Oskar continues savagely beating his drum, serving as the angry conscience of a world gone mad. The intense and visceral Tin Drum was one of the most financially successful German films of the 1970s and won the 1979 Oscar for Best Foreign Film and the 1979 Golden Palm (which it shared with Apocalypse Now). In the late '90s, the film became the center of a censorship controversy when some U.S. videotapes were confiscated because of the film's supposed violation of a child pornography statute. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi