John Sloss Movies

Directed by Michael Mayer and based on The Hours author Michael Cunningham's novel of the same name, A Home at the End of the World chronicles the 1980s reunion of childhood best friends Bobby (Colin Farrell) and Jonathan (Dallas Roberts). Where they were once best pals -- and teenage lovers -- in the suburbs of Cleveland, Bobby has become a charismatic but go-nowhere heterosexual slacker, and Jonathan is now living as an openly gay man in New York City, hoping to serve as father to his eccentric roommate Clare's (Robin Wright Penn) child. When Bobby impulsively moves to the city to be closer to his former friend, their bonds are tested sooner than anyone would have thought. Bobby falls for Clare, and in doing so, effectively eliminates what would have been Jonathan's position in the baby's life. Jonathan temporarily takes off; when his father dies, and he attends the Arizona funeral, Bobby and Clare unexpectedly turn up with the news that she's expecting. Despite the still-existent tensions, the trio becomes a family unit among themselves, ultimately buying a house in Woodstock, Upstate New York, where they all move together, challenging traditional notions of family, commitment, love, and devotion. ~ Tracie Cooper, All Movie Guide

David Mamet's play about three losers planning a robbery is brought to the screen in an admirably simple, straightforward manner. Don (Dennis Franz) is the owner of an "antique store" (read: junk shop) who discovers that the buffalo head nickel he recently sold to a coin collector was a lot more valuable than he imagined. Don hatches a scheme in which he and Bobby (Sean Nelson), a teenage kid who works at the shop, will steal the nickel back and sell it for a much higher price. Teach (Dustin Hoffman), Don's down-on-his-luck buddy, insists on coming in on the job, but Don isn't sure he wants Teach's help -- or that the robbery is a good idea at all. While director Michael Corrente occasionally moves the action out of the shop (unlike the original play), American Buffalo maintains nearly all the dialogue of the original play and its three-man cast. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Richard Linklater directs the romantic drama Before Sunset, a sequel to Before Sunrise (1995). Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) were strangers who spent a loquacious night together in Vienna. Nine years later, Jesse has written a book about the encounter. During his accelerated European book tour, he reunites with Celine in Paris. Before Jesse's flight home, he joins Celine for a picturesque walk around Paris peppered with intimate conversation: at first, about the minutiae of their day-to-day lives and their relationships, and then about their lingering feelings for one another. Before Sunset was nominated for the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival. ~ Andrea LeVasseur, All Movie Guide

Two young people from different cultures fall in love and have to face the emotional fallout of their actions in this urban drama set in Brooklyn's rough-and-tumble Crown Heights neighborhood. Sol (Tariq Trotter) is a young man of West Indian descent who is the leader of a group of Afrocentric hip-hop musicians struggling to succeed in the recording industry. Sol and his friend Scratch (Bonz Malone) get into an auto accident one afternoon with Judah (David Vadim), a young Jewish man out for a drive with his girlfriend Sara (Karen Goberman). While Judah and Scratch get into an argument, Sol and Sara attempt to deal with the problem more reasonably, and the two find they have an unexpected rapport. Sol and Sara become fast friends, and their friendship soon grows into a romance, but Sara finds that Judah is both angry and heartbroken about her new relationship, while her conservative family does not trust Sol. Sol's friends, meanwhile, are no more supportive of him, believing he's betraying his culture by becoming involved with Sara. Leading man Tariq Trotter (also known as Black Thought) is the frontman of the acclaimed hip-hop group the Roots, who appear in the film as Sol's band and perform several original compositions for the soundtrack. Brooklyn Babylon received its world premiere as an opening night attraction at the 2001 Slamdance Film Festival, where it was screened over the objections of the film's distributor, Artisan Pictures. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

A city pulses with racial problems, political corruption, and small-time crime in this ambitious microcosm of urban life, written and directed by John Sayles. Nick Rinaldi (Vincent Spano), a lost soul usually high on drink and drugs, has spent his life in one New Jersey city, getting free rides from his connected father (Tony LoBianco) and hearing the locals talk of his brother's death in Vietnam. Searching for more control, Nick quits the cushy contractor's job provided by his Dad, feeling that major events are about to happen to him. That feeling proves accurate -- by film's end his life will change, as will the lives of many others. Nick is only the center of the movie's sprawling collection of people and plotlines; Sayles takes full advantage of this expansive landscape, as he often begins shooting one conversation, only to pull back and eavesdrop on another, in one smooth, intriguing shot. By listening in, we slowly learn about the citizens and their dilemmas, as the city's woes bubble to a narrative climax. Many of Sayles' regular players are on-screen (the movie features 52 roles), including Joe Morton as a frustrated councilman and David Strathairn as a disturbed street person. ~ Norm Schrager, All Movie Guide

Maverick director Todd Haynes embraces the look and feel of classic Hollywood melodramas of the 1950s in this period drama. Cathy Whitaker (Julianne Moore) and her husband, Frank (Dennis Quaid), are a seemingly perfect couple; living in a handsome suburban neighborhood in Hartford, CT, in 1957, Cathy and Frank have a beautiful home and two happy, healthy children, while Frank pursues a successful career in sales and Cathy cares for the home. But Cathy has begun to sense something isn't quite right in her marriage, as Frank begins working late, spending less time with her, and seems cold and distant. One day, Cathy visits Frank's work and discovers something she never expected -- her husband is kissing a man. At Cathy's urging, Frank undergoes psychotherapy, but as she tries to keep up a brave face, the emotional trauma takes a great toll on her, and she finds there are very few people she can talk with. Cathy strikes up a friendship with Raymond Deagan (Dennis Haysbert), an African-American gardener who works for the Whitakers, and as she discovers how intelligent and compassionate Raymond is, she finds herself drawn to him. However, Hartford is in many ways still a small town, and when Mona (Celia Weston) sees Cathy and Raymond alone together, it sets off a wave of vicious gossip that threatens to make the Whitakers' many secrets public knowledge. Far from Heaven premiered at the 2002 Venice Film Festival, where Julianne Moore's performance won the prize for Best Actress. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

William Shakespeare's classic tale is brought to the screen for the third time in ten years in this modernized interpretation. Writer/director Michael Almereyda updates the story to the present day, where Hamlet (Ethan Hawke) is a struggling filmmaker whose personal and familial trials are set against the machinations of a huge production firm called the Denmark Corporation. Joining Hamlet as he seeks revenge for the death of his father and the wedding of his mother to an enemy are Kyle MacLachlan as Claudius, Julia Stiles as Ophelia, Bill Murray as Polonius, Sam Shepard as the ghost of Hamlet's father, Diane Venora as Gertrude, Steve Zahn as Rosencrantz, and Dechen Thurman as Guildenstern. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Drawn into a menacing underground world of the New Orleans elite while searching for her missing sister, Muriel (Shalom Harlow), Amelia (Liane Balaban) is aided in her investigation by ex-CIA agent Bill (Clarence Williams III) in this effort from Nadja director Michael Almereyda. Soon discovering mysterious webcam footage on Muriel's laptop computer that will seemingly aid them in finding Amelia's sister, the duo is confronted with shifting identities in a scene where no one is quite who they appear to be on the surface. An obscure and disturbing study in the nature of avatars in the age of technological isolation, Almereyda's haunting drama soon leads Amelia and Bill into a complex web buried deep in the underground of a mysterious and sometimes menacing city. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide

The down-and-dirty side of building management in pre-gentrification Manhattan sets the stage for this dark comedy. It's 1981, and Joe Peltz (David Krumholtz) runs a newsstand in New York City, where he has recently married Annabelle (Clara Bellar), an exotic dancer from France who isn't in love with Joe but asked for his hand so she could get a Green Card. When Annabelle discovers she's pregnant, the couple decides they need a larger apartment, and Joe finds a flat in the East Village that's on the same block where his great-great-grandparents lived when they first came to America. However, the neighborhood is decaying and ridden with crime, and when Joe and Annabelle move into their new apartment, he's immediately drafted onto the building's co-op board, where he has to deal with a variety of eccentrics of various stripes and must often sleep in the lobby armed with a baseball bat to ward off junkies and burglars. But by far his biggest problem is Carlos DeJesus (Paul Calderon), a bully who has been squatting in the building for eight years with his roughneck teenage son, Segundo (Jon Budinoff). Carlos sees no reason why he should start paying rent, and he's made enemies with practically everyone who lives in the building, wasting no time in adding Joe and Annabelle to that list. So when a gasoline fire guts Carlos' apartment, the question is not who wanted him out, but who actually had the nerve to start the blaze. Based on a novel by Joel Rose, Kill the Poor was written for the screen by Daniel Handler, best known as the author of the popular "Lemony Snicket" books. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Reminiscent of a fine novel in depth and complexity, writer-director John Sayles' acclaimed drama uses the investigation of a 25-year-old murder as the framework for a detailed exploration of life in a Texas border town. The nominal center of the film is Sheriff Sam Deeds (the superb, subtle Chris Cooper), the chief law officer of the town of Frontera. The low-key Sam is also the son of the late Buddy Deeds (played in flashbacks by Matthew McConaughey), who also served as town sheriff and still maintains a legendary status for ousting the vicious, corrupt Charlie Wade (a memorably vicious Kris Kristofferson). The discovery of Wade's decades-old skeleton, however, calls this legend into question, and forces Sam to begin an investigation. During this search for the truth, Sam must come to terms with his own troubled emotions about his father and his still-lingering romantic feelings for Pilar (Elizabeth Peña), a Hispanic woman that Buddy had prevented him from seeing as a young man. Lone Star's scope encompasses not only this story but the whole town, addressing Pilar's difficulties as a schoolteacher, the conflict between incoming immigrants and border patrol officers, and the troubles faced by the African-American commander of the local military base. Sayles expertly moves between past and present, weaving his stories together to illustrate, as in his earlier City of Hope (1991), how the seemingly disparate parts of a community are in fact intimately interconnected. Raising issues of race, politics, and identity, Lone Star nevertheless focuses most of its attention on its complex, believable characters, well-performed by an excellent ensemble cast. One of the most financially successful of Sayles' low-key movies, Lone Star received glowing notices and an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay. ~ Judd Blaise, All Movie Guide

A young student (Zac Efron) finds love in the theater after being cast in a production of Julius Caesar directed by Orson Welles (Christian McKay) in this 1930s-era romance directed by Richard Linklater. Claire Danes co-stars in the CinemaNX production, with adapting duties handled by Holly Gent Palmo and Vincent Palmo Jr. from the Robert Kaplow novel. ~ Jeremy Wheeler, All Movie Guide

Throughout his work, documentary filmmaker Errol Morris has sought out characters lost in their own eccentric worlds, and he has managed to convey their sense of wonder with their passion, be it a topiary gardener arguing the merits of hand shears in Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997) or astrophysicist Stephen Hawking discussing the origin of the universe in A Brief History of Time (1992). In his most provocative work since The Thin Blue Line (1988), Morris details what happens when this interior dreamscape collides with the hard facts of history. As a young man accompanying his father to work at a state prison, Fred A. Leuchter, a bespectacled mouse of a man, learned how inefficient and inhumane most executions were, and he set out to design and build a better electric chair. Soon he began getting offers from state institutions throughout the country to redesign their electric chairs, along with gas chambers, gallows, and lethal injection machines. He quickly became a renowned expert in capital punishment. When the notorious Nazi sympathizer Ernest Zündel was arrested in Canada, he needed an expert witness to corroborate his assertion that the Holocaust was a hoax; and Leuchter soon found himself chiseling chunks from the gas chamber walls in Auschwitz -- on his honeymoon. His illegal samples showed no significant residue of cyanide, so he concluded that the Holocaust did not happen. He soon became a celebrity of the neo-Nazi set: he testified on behalf of Zündel, gave lectures around the world, and published the Holocaust revisionist tract Leuchter Report. Much to his surprise, his death-machine business began to flounder, his marriage collapsed, and he found himself pursued by Jewish organizations and creditors. This film was screened at the 1999 Toronto Film Festival. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide

From a script by first-time screenwriter Benjamin Brand, filmmaker Greg Harrison helmed this fantastical, psychological drama, the follow-up to his 2000 Independent Spirit-award nominated debut, Groove. Courteney Cox Arquette (TV's Friends) stars as Sophie Jacobs, a photographer who is stricken with feelings of guilt and sadness when her boyfriend is murdered during a robbery. Haunted by a belief that she could have somehow prevented the death, Sophie soon begins to see things that ought not be there and is forced to question the reality around her. Also starring James LeGros and Anne Archer, November had its premiere at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival. ~ Matthew Tobey, All Movie Guide