Biography

Gandhi (Widescreen Two-Disc Special Edition)

Sir Richard Attenborough's 1982 multiple-Oscar winner (including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor for Ben Kingsley) is an engrossing, reverential look at the life of Mohandas K. Gandhi, who introduced the doctrine of nonviolent resistance to the colonized people of India and who ultimately gained the nation its independence. Kingsley is magnificent as Gandhi as he changes over the course of the three-hour film from an insignificant lawyer to an international leader and symbol. Strong on history (the historic division between India and Pakistan, still a huge problem today, can be seen in its formative stages here) as well as character and ideas, this is a fine film. --Tom Keogh

Stills from Gandhi (click for larger image)

Beyond Gandhi on Amazon.com

Other Oscar Winners at Oscar Central

More Biographies on DVD

The Films of Ben Kingsley

A critical masterpiece, GANDHI is an intriguing story about activism, politics, religious tolerance and freedom. But at the center of it all is an extraor- dinary man who fought for a nonviolent, peaceful existence, and set an entire nation free. Winner of 8 Academy Awards® including Best Picture, Best Director (Lord Richard Attenborough) and Best Actor (Sir Ben Kingsley), GANDHI's highly acclaimed cast also includes Candice Bergen, Edward Fox, Sir John Gielgud, Roshan Seth and Martin Sheen.

The extras include more than 90 minutes of new material, including interviews with director Lord Richard Attenborough; actors Geraldine James, Saeed Jaffrey, and Edward Fox; Diana Hawkins (Director of Publicity), Terry Clegg (Executive in charge of production), Billy Williams (Cinematographer) and Stuart Craig (Production Designer). The DVD includes a Director's commentary with Attenborough, who also filmed a personal introduction to the film. The featurettes include In Search of Gandhi, Reflections on Ben, Madeleine Slade: An Englishwoman Abroad, The Funeral, Shooting an Epic In India, Looking Back, Designing Gandhi (3 mini featurettes) and From the Director's Chair (2 mini featurettes).

The Scarlet and the Black

Brother Sun, Sister Moon

It seemed like a good idea in 1973: a musical scored by Donovan about the life and times of St. Francis of Assisi, the passionate ascetic who expressed love for God by loving nature. But the finished product was something else. Filmmaker Franco Zeffirelli (Endless Love) makes a decorous effort at communicating the ideals of Francis and even tweaking the character toward flower-power relevance. But the result is feel-good fluff, a boring movie that doesn't penetrate its subject as much as reinvent him toward a modern bias. Graham Faulkner is entirely forgettable in the lead, and Donovan's songs on this project aren't exactly first-rate, either. --Tom Keogh

My Father's Glory

Among the bounteous literary and cinematic legacy of Marcel Pagnol, poet laureate of Provence, is a two-volume memoir, My Father's Glory and My Mother's Castle. The enormous success of Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring (Claude Berri's 1986 remakes of two Pagnol films from the '50s) encouraged Yves Robert to shoot another Pagnol diptych. Like Garlaban, the great bluff overhanging Pagnol's childhood home, the result is "less than a mountain, much more than a hill." The first part, My Father's Glory, spans Marcel's early years from infancy to preteen. The film keeps faith with its juvenile subject, leaping from one quirky detail of landscape, character, or biography to the next--whatever has caught the child's fancy and lingered in the adult narrator's memory. This makes for episodic storytelling, but it's an appropriate way to reflect childhood experience, and it doesn't prevent Robert from developing loving portraits of Pagnol's nearest and dearest, or paying luminous tribute to the Provençal countryside Pagnol loved. You can almost feel the sunshine, smell the wild thyme. --Richard T. Jameson

Based on the best-selling memoirs of French novelist/filmmaker Marcel Pagnol, this captivating recollection of a young boy's life in turn-of-the-century South of France is an intelligent, emotionallyrealistic account of a more idyllic time. A glorious celebration of family, this is one of the most beguiling films since charm went out of fashion (Time)! Among the intoxicating hills of rustic Bastide Neuve, young Marcel and his family experience an unforgettable summer holiday. Marcel,mystified by nature, eagerly turns to his father, Joseph, for an education on the ways of the wild.But Joseph comes up short in Marcel's eyes when cantankerous Uncle Julesan experienced woodsmanproves to be far more knowledgeable. To redeem himself, Joseph challenges Jules to a hunting matchto prove once and for all that he is not only the patriarch but a father who deserves respect.

My Mother's Castle

The second part of Yves Robert's filming of Marcel Pagnol's childhood memoirs completes the narrative so casually begun in My Father's Glory--and fulfills a radiant journey we hadn't even realized we'd embarked on. Marcel is approaching his teens and acquiring a more coherent sense of the world. Accordingly, My Mother's Castle boasts a more concentrated style and unspools its story over (mostly) the space of one year, as opposed to a dozen. Whereas in the first film Robert had worked entirely with little-known players who simply became Marcel's family, here he calls upon screen veterans Jean Rochefort, Jean Carmet, and Georges Wilson to flesh out sharply ironical figures who loom challengingly on the young man's horizon. Consistent with Pagnol's emphasis on Provençal locations, the focal event of the film becomes the weekly walk the Marseilles-based family makes from the trolley station to their remote country cottage--a quintessentially mundane ritual that comes to be fraught with wonder, delight, and terror. It all leads to a payoff that opens the meaning of the title only as the film is reaching its transcendent conclusion. --Richard T. Jameson

Little Buddha

In many ways Little Buddha is a companion piece to Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor. A beautiful travelogue and history lesson unfolds in the two parts of this film: a historical text of Siddhartha (Keanu Reeves) and the contemporary quest of Lama Norbu (Ying Ruocheng), who believes he has found the reincarnation of his former teacher in a Seattle child. The ancient, magical tales sweep away the blasé contemporary action. Ruocheng's presence drives the story of discovery as the child learns about the teachings of Buddhism. A visual feast that will dazzle both young and old. In fact, were it not a religious icon, the youngsters might want Siddhartha dolls after viewing his magical on-screen adventures. Beautiful cinematography by Vittorio Storaro. --Doug Thomas

Keanu Reeves (SPEED) and Bridget Fonda (IT COULD HAPPEN TO YOU) star in this motion picture spectacular from Academy Award(R)-winning director Bernardo Bertolucci (THE LAST EMPEROR). In a big American CIty, a boy and his family (Fonda and Chris Isaak -- SILENCE OF THE LAMBS) discover a story about a prince in a land of miracles. But the miracle becomes real when Tibetan monks appear, searching for their leader's reincarnation -- who they believe has been reborn in the boy. Suddenly, their worlds meet, leading the Americans on an extraordinary adventure!

Camille Claudel

"Miss Claudel has become a master."
"She has the talent of a man."
"She's a witch."

And so Auguste Rodin and friends neatly sum up the sad trajectory of Camille Claudel's career.

We first meet the sculptor as she digs clay with bare fingers from a frozen ditch, in the winter of 1885. By the time the film leaves her, in 1913, she's an acclaimed, if socially scorned, artist who's been committed to an asylum.

In the interim, Claudel (Isabelle Adjani) falls in love with the famous, older, womanizing Rodin (Gérard Depardieu). Claudel abandons her work to assist the creatively bankrupt Rodin, filling in as his muse, assistant, and lover. When pregnancy forces Claudel to ask him to choose between her and his longtime mistress, he won't, she leaves, and their alliance ends. This proves to be the turning point for Claudel's mental health; when her affair with Rodin ends, she begins her intimacy with insanity.

As her madness blooms, so do her long-neglected sculptures, which seem to come to life in her hands and arms. Not only a potent love story, Camille Claudel is also an account of art and its wellsprings, and this is where it excels, especially when we witness Claudel's manic genius at work, driven by the necessity to externalize her emotions in the forms of her sculptures.

In the end, the viewer wonders about the causes of Claudel's madness: was it genes, or her reaction against society's mores, or the product of Rodin's persecution? Or, as one exasperated family member terms it, was it "the madness of mud"? --Stefanie Durbin

International screen star Isabelle Adjani (The Story Of Adele H., Ishtar) is the creative prodigy Camille Claudel. GÃ(c)rard Depardieu (Green Card, Cyrano de Bergerac) is thelegendary sculptor Rodin. This is the true story of their passionate obsession with artand with each other. Both an inspiring saga of artistic vision and the haunting portrayal of a doomed romance, Camille Claudel is a beautiful and stirring cinematic masterpiece. A historically accurate depiction of one of the most important collaborations in the history of modern art, Camille Claudel was nominated for the 1989 Academy AwardÂ(r) for Best Foreign Language Film,and Adjani was nominated for the 1989 OscarÂ(r) for Best Actress for her riveting portrayalof the beautiful young woman who sacrifices her talents to flames of passion.

Impromptu

Still more Victorian country-house shenanigans: novelist George Sand (Judy Davis, affected but pretty darn charming) has eyes for Franz Liszt's young protégé Chopin (Hugh Grant, solid as always, but burdened by a silly Polish accent and a script that never lets him stretch out), but various lovers, jealous rivals, and Chopin's own overdeveloped sense of propriety conspire to confound her. Impromptu is witty but overlong--probably 20 minutes of hijinks and repartee, not to mention several completely gratuitous and redundant characters, could have been sliced from the film. Davis plays Sand as an impetuous, overgrown tomboy, outraging her genteel hosts by wearing pants, chomping cigars, and falling off horses; her coterie of artist-friends assure us, in a series of naked plot devices, that she nonetheless has a heart of gold. It's all good silly fun, and about as feminist as your average Def Leppard video--the other two developed female characters are ugly stereotypes: a featherbrained, feckless social climber (Emma Thompson, who once again proves she's up for anything) and a spiteful, back-stabbing shrew (the ever-capable Bernadette Peters). Director James Lapine clearly belongs to the Dr. Quinn school of historical accuracy, so don't expect to learn anything about the period or the artists themselves. Impromptu is far more Melrose Place than Mrs. Dalloway, or perhaps best described as an episode of Entertainment Tonight set in the 19th century. --Miles Bethany

Shine

This tearjerker by Australian filmmaker Scott Hicks is a surprising story about real-life classical pianist David Helfgott, an Australian who rose to international prominence at a very young age in the 1950s and '60s, and suffered a psychological collapse after enduring years of abuse from his father (Armin Mueller-Stahl). Hicks has three very fine actors portraying Helfgott at different stages of his life, including the adorably wry and goofy Noah Taylor (Flirting), who takes up the character's teen years, and Oscar winner Geoffrey Rush, giving a great performance playing the musician as a schizophrenic adult. Despite the Helfgotts' compromised psychological health, Shine is hardly a depressing experience. If anything, the story is really about how long one person's life can take to make glorious sense of itself. Sir John Gielgud, in golden form, plays Helfgott's teacher. The DVD release presents the film in its widescreen format, and also includes a Q&A with director Hicks and Rush's Golden Globes acceptance speech. --Tom Keogh

Queen Margot (La Reine Margot)

Based on a novel by Alexandre Dumas, Queen Margot concerns the events behind infamous Massacre of St. Bartholomew in 16th-century France. Isabelle Adjani plays Margot, betrothed for political reasons to one man (Daniel Auteuil) by her mother (Virna Lisi), while she is, in fact, in love with another (Vincent Pérez). Despite the bond that grows between the reluctant couple, plots are hatching all over the castle against the royals. Adventurous, exciting, erotic, and given strong artistic credibility through its outstanding cast, the film is enthralling and visually sumptuous. Directed by Patrice Chereau, less known outside of France than is the film's producer, Claude Berri (director of Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring). --Tom Keogh

A classic tale of intrigue and forbidden love, QUEEN MARGOT is the powerful hit universally acclaimed by critics! Thrown into a political marriage of convenience by her ruthlessly power-hungry family, the beautiful Margot (Isabelle Adjani -- DIABOLIQUE) soon finds herself hopelessly drawn into their murderous affairs. It's then she realizes that her only hope of escape lies somewhere between the heroic soldier who loves her and the enemy husband who could save her! Triumphant winner of 5 Cesar Awards the pretigious Cannes Film Festival Jury Prize -- you're sure to be entertained by this vivid portrayal of passion, revenge, and extraordinary courage!