Movies Worth Seeing
I managed to see a sneak of this film opening Friday. It stars Denzel Washington as Frank Lucas, a real drug kingpin in New York City in the early 70s. He cornered the heroin business there by going directly to Asian drug growers and using a relative in the Army to ship the drugs to the states in military coffins returning from Vietnam. Russell Crowe plays the honest cop who ran the task force who brings him down. And the arrest led to the indictment of nearly 2/3 of New York’s drug enforcement cops. The corruption in the city at that time was unbelievable. The film is directed with style by Ridley Scott, who brought us films like Gladiator, Blade Runner and Alien. It’s kind of like a black Scarface, only a lot more realistic and without all the swearing.
An excellent WWII movie about a Dutch Jewish woman hiding from the Nazis who ends up working for the resistance as a spy. She becomes the girlfriend of a Gestapo officer and things get really complicated when she falls in love with him. It’s a tremendous thriller with lots of twists and turns, directed surprisingly by Paul Verhoven, who brought us such films as Total Recall and Showgirls. Verhoven went back to his native Netherlands when his Hollywood career had fizzled out, and may have revived it with this epic film. Warning: It is subtitled. Parts of it are in English. And theres a lot more sex than you’re used to seeing in an American war film. But none of it is gratuitous.
In 1971 a writer names Clifford Irving claimed to have exclusive access to reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes. He managed to hoax a lot of people and got a one million dollar advance, which was unheard of for the time. But eventually the whole scheme unraveled. Richard Gere plays Irving and Alfred Molina plays his nutty researcher. Like American Gangster, The Hoax does a great job of recreating the feel of the early 1970s and chronicles another crime that was going on in New York at the time. Man, that city was a mess back then. Gere and the rest of the cast do a stellar job. Molina is especially good.
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