Historical Movies: History, especially stories we like to believe or know.

Richard Attenborough's film focuses on the powerful convictions of the lawyer who led the nonviolent revolt against the British in the years following Wordl War 1. The biopic is a sweeping account of the life and times of Mohandas K. Gandhi, the saintly, pacifist father of modern India.

The film opens at the funeral of Gandhi, followed by his life in chronological backflashes, focusing on the passive resistance that became the trademark of his struggle for independence from Britain.

The three-plus-hour epic is indeed faithful to the historical records of Gandhi's achievements and his revolutionary adherence to nonviolence as a powerful political weapon. At the same time, Attenborough almost avoids the heart of the man, choosing to beatify Gandhi instead. In this movie, Gandhi is the Mahatma--the "Great Soul"--but never Gandhi the Man.

At the center of the film is Ben Kingsley's riveting performance as Gandi. Kingsley is an Anglo-Indian, born Krishna Banji in 1944 in England. The film took him to India for the first time, yet he ensured that he gave his performance an extra dimension by immersing himself in Gandhi's way of life, like sitting cross-legged on a mat, following his diet and practising yoga.

The flick was created before the era of computer-generated images, yet the film's brilliantly directed and photographed, movingly told, and convincingly performed by an exceptional cast.

Shot mostly on location in India, it features thousand of real extras with lavish details. With Gandi, Attenborough proved that epics on the scale of Ben Hur were still possible in the eighties, and that historical epics would always have a place in cinema.

In the film, however, Gandhi's assassination seems to come out of the blue--we're not told that there was a bombing attempt on his life just a few weeks earlier.

Reading between the lines, it's apparent that Gandi's religious openness wasn't anything that most Hindus or Muslims were interested in sharing. Not even his devotion to the cause of India's "untouchables."

Gandhi became a hero to the people of India not because of his elevated spirituality or his enlightened pacifism. They loved him because he took no notice from the British by defying their Anglo-Saxons' rules, and the Indian population bought into his nonviolence program because it worked!

The sad reality is that on the same day that Britain granted India independence, the country was split in two. Jinnah's dream of a Muslim state, Pakistan, was fulfilled.

Attenborough, who'd struggled to make this biopic film for 20 years, sought to resurrect the man for a modern generation. The resulting film won nine Oscars, including Bes Picture, Best Director and Best Actor.

Be inspired, persecuted and be saved.

The film is an example of great direction and its concentration on the trial of Joan of Arc shot largely in close-ups achieves a perceptive, poignant and an extraordinary intensity. It is convincing historically while also representing a wider comment on the persecution of those who threaten the status quo.

Clarck Gable and Vivien Leigh in their pre and post civil war romantic drama. The costume, the background, the actors, and the director himself,--everything in one and perfect place. Of course, it's my grandparents' era and I love it too.

This film makes no attempt to tell a realistic story. Director Francis Ford Coppola is interested in myth, horror, and emotion. His lead actor, Martin Sheen, perfectly captures the subjectivity of horror, forcing the audience to look at things through his eyes.

In recalling the difficulty of filming Apocalypse Now, Coppola even made a remark that: during the shoot, there were times when he thought he would literally die, as a result of inability to solve his problems.

It took three insane and gruelling years, from 1976 to 1979 to complete the film. And after showing the flick, the 'rest is history' as majority claimed. Although the genre peaked with this film, generations of filmmakers have felt inspired to measure to themselves against this model.

Stylistically perfect and theatrical in structure and design, the film depicted war more elaborately and more 'effectively' than any other production before or since.

When you go to see a period film, you are always guaranteed good costumes, yet the story line can be a hit or a miss. But not so with this film. It has the beautiful costumes but also a captivating plot.

The film is a tale of love, betrayal, and revenge, and some convincing performances put in the screen by two Boleyn sisters (Portman and Johanssen) competing for the love of king, Henry VIII (Eana) himself. The film is perhaps a far better offering than the recent version Marie Antoinette.

For a two hour film, it is almost an accurate account of the time and life of King Henry VIII.

Few directors would always get international audience.

And when one considers the positive public response to many of David Lean's films, it is just fair to say that only few directors have commanded such a large portion of the mass audience.

Working again with his screenwriter Robert Bolt, Lean's epic film Doctor Zhivago could be described as " a fateful series of brief encounters."

The complicated narrative is held together by a series of connecting and associative images--moon, windows, candles, cornflowers and daffodils to suggest the two women in Zhivago's life.

Doctor Zhivago (Omar Shariff) is the idealistic doctor hero swept along by the epic events of the Russian Revolution in Bolt's adaptation of Boris Pasternak's Nobel Prize-winning novel. Banned in the Soviet Union but acclaimed in the West, the novel is a about the story of love and a great documentary of the Bolshevik Revolution.

The lovers are Zhivago and the beautiful, sensual Lara (Julie Christie), for whom a brief happiness is tragically engulfed by the tide of history. There is a stunning last shot of Lara, as she disappears alone down a grey street that is dominated by a huge red poster of Stalin.

It is an image that crystallizes the theme of the individual and the state, as well as implicitly asking questions that are at the heart of Dr Zhivago--what the revolution was for, where it led, and, whom it affected.

Again, Director Lean has approached this film with his customary deliberation and meticulous preparation.

Inasmuch as some critics found the flick to be something of a disappoinment, it's a film with stunning cinematography, good script, and talented people behind it.

Documentary, history and monumental epic rolled into one.

The film takes us into the life of Pu YI, the last emperor of the Qing Dynasty. As a three-year-old he ascends the throne as "Emperor for 10,000," eventhough his empire is unstable and crumbling beyond the palace walls.

Oscar-winning director Bernardo Bertolucci's film was produced at great expense, as he employed a huge cast of extras, and was made entirely on location in China.

It's an exotic and fascinating film that would overwhelms Westeners: eunuchs populate the palace, concubines offer themselves, food tasters control the emperor's nutrition, and doctors study his stool. Individual characters are carefully hidden behind faces covered in stereotypical make up. Pu Yi also remains a stranger, even when he dances the Charleston or climbs into bed with two women at the same time.

Taking him to Manchukuo, where Japanese set up a puppet regime in an effort to oppose communism, Pu Yi becomes a toy in the hand of the new powers, and, ultimately, their victim. He ends up in a Communist re-education camp for ten years, from which he gains an early release, and returns to Beijing as a gardener.

The film is a story without a happy ending. Exploring the evolution of a human subject by depicting the transformation from "a dragon to a butterfly" syndrome, Bertolucci has explored a more intimate world of personal relationships affected by the conflicting worlds of different cultures.

At the end of his life, Pu Yi reduced to a broken man in Mao uniform. Although tragic, one cannot help but feel that somehow he is responsible for his own fate.

The first female ruler of England at the age of 23--no wonder, its the golden age era.

Michael Mann's The Last of the Mohicans is a third-generation fiction: a film adapted from a film that was adapted from a novel.

Chingachgook (Russell Means), his son Uncas (Eric Schweig), and Hawkeye (Daniel Day-Lewis), his adopted white son; Cora Munro (Madeleine Stowe) and her sister Alice (Jodhi May), their father, Colonel Edmund Munro (Maurice Roëves), and a native guide named Magua (Wes Studi) are all creations of James Fenimore Cooper and his novel of the same title. What everybody read about in the Last of the Mohicans was a romance of the forest, of Indians and Natty Bumppo (the white man who learned from them), of a society barely gone.

The 1992 movie, however, is a romance, with a mixture of period setting and fictional characters, and a dose of twentieth-century spirituality to bring the noble savages up-to-date. It's a film with history as vivid and real and immediate as if it were being lived right now.

Mann's new plot now explains, for instance why it needed a revolution: to protect the democratic, freedom-loving, interracial society from supercilious twits. Nathaniel (Day-Lewis), the white raised by Indians, is the emblem of this egalitarian society. Cora symbolizes the rejection of her dead (quite literally, by the end) European past. In its place, she embraces Nathaniel and America.

A very heartwarming story. The struggles of Israelites from Egyptians 'retold' in a similar fashion with the Jews during World War 11. The parallelism is almost the same, and the only diference is TIME.

Al Pacino is the best! With a mixture of Italian and American culture, and the dark side of it, is put together in one film.Exceptional story plot. It's a film for adults combined with sharp, intelligent and witty acting and dialogues. There is so much to this film!

Laughing in the face of adversity is the best way to triumph over it.

At least this is what the film Life Is Beautiful is trying to connect and perhaps wants its viewers in awe as well as ponder upon. It is a funny and touching film that works best if one doesn't take it too seriously.

The first part of the film is blithe and playful, a fine showcase for the star and director's unstoppable verve. Of course, one of the themes of the film is the desire to protect the innocent from the horrors of life at any cost, to show them that life is beautiful.

The film's attempts to do this in such an extreme situation is admirable, yet the compromises of the reality of the situation is apparently inevitable. How could you justify reality in the face of adversity?

This is an unpretentious and likable film that plays with history both seriously and mischievously...

There's no doubt that Robin Williams is such a versatile actor.

He's a terrific actor when he's serious, as in the case of his character in Dead Poets Society. This flick was a huge success when it was shown in the Australian cinema about two decades ago.

"Carpe Diem, lads! Seize the day! Make your lives extraordinary!" new teacher John Keating (Williams) preaches to his English lit students at Vermont's exclusive Welton Academy in the fall of 1959.

John Keating is the outgoing, insurrectionary teacher who opposes the numbing, by-rote brainwashing methods of so much institutional book-learning and encourages his kids to follow their passions, and to think for themselves.
Keating denounces the first page of the book and describes it as rubbish and commands his students to rip the introduction from the book.

Keating makes poetry attractive to these boys by presenting it as an age-old seduction technique. Naturally, the younger generation chooses to emulate their idol.

Keating:Seize the day while you're young, see that you make use of your time. Why does the poet write these lines?

One Student: Because he's in a hurry?

Keating:Because we're food for worms, lads! Because we're only going to experienced limited number of springs, summers, and falls. One day, hard as it is to believe, each and every one of us is going to stop breathing, turn cold, and die!

I guess, I could say the same:"Carpe Diem. Watch this film!"

From the earliest years of European settlement in Australia, there is evidence of Aboriginal children being taken from their families as the authorities believed it was for their own good. In the first half of the 20th century, it was official policy in most states to remove half or quarter caste Aboriginal children.

This movie is the true story of Doris Pilkington Garimara's mother Molly, who in 1931 led her two sisters on a 1,600 kilometre walk across remote Western Australia. At their tender age, they escaped the confinement of a government institution for Aboriginal children removed from their families.

Barefoot, without provisions or maps, tracked by Native police and search planes, the girls followed the rabbit-proof fence, knowing it would lead them home.

It's one of my favourites.

This truly is inspired filmmaking!

Australian writer/director Robert Connoly's political thriller Balibo sheds light on war crimes that have been covered up for more than 30 years. Boldly political and unashamedly provocative, it tells the true story of 1975 and the murder of five Australian journalists in East Timor in the lead-up to the invasion by Indonesia.

In November 1975, four weeks after five journalists are reported missing in East Timor, veteran Australian foreign correspondent Roger East (La Paglia) is approached by 25 year old Jose Ramos-Horta (Isaac) and offered a job as head of East Timor's news agency. Refusing to accept the official reports that his colleagues were killed in crossfire, East sees the job as an opportunity to uncover the truth and travels with Ramos-Horta to East Timor.

Intercut with their journey is the story of how the five Australian journalists, four weeks earlier, made their way to Balibo determined to film the impending Indonesian invasion.

The Indonesian assault is particularly compelling and marks one of the most shattering finales in Australian film history. This film engages a new audience who knows nothing of this extraordinary piece of history. Regardless of historical knowledge, more powerful is the feeling of pride for the Balibo Five who rushed to East Timor's side when the world turned its back.

The idea of making a film about Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the legendary founder of psychoanalysis, is not immediately attractive.

The film is a great drama, but closet drama, in which most of the action takes place within the mind. The question is how to translate this action into a viable script that would produce a film from which audiences would not flee?

Film makers discovered three ways to make the tragicomedy of Freud's heroic years filmworthy. First, they depict Freud thinking to himself as he stalks around Vienna at night, in top hat and overcoat. This technique of dramatizing historic though processes led them to have Montgomery Clift, who portrays Freud, do a great deal of staring.

What Freud does relatively well is depict a brilliant man's search--even though his discoveries, like Charcot's treatments of hysterics, come a bit too easily and too casually.

However, for anyone eager to establish a useful timetable of early psychoanalysis, a good biography remains indispensable...

Who hasn't heard of the (supposedly) crazy Dutchman who cut off his ear, and then shot himself in a wheat field while painting his last work?

This film spans the last seven years of Vincent Van Gogh's life (c1883-90), the period of his almost unbearably intense development as an artist. Much of it was filmed at the actual locations, as well as many of his original paintings are shown and the film faithfully recreates many of the scenes in some of his most famous works.

The performances by Douglas and Quinn (as Gaugin) and the supporting actors reflect the level of commitment of all those who were involved in the production. Gauguin, another eccentric, was far more famous at the time than Van Gogh, and his approach to art was diametrically opposed to Van Gogh's. He painted what was in his mind, not the glories of nature that absorbed Van Gogh.

Touching and tragic, this is a glorious, brilliant film that memorializes the world's greatest painter.

Among the many virtues of Rosa Luxemberg is the aesthetic and political sense it makes of the beliefs and behaviour of people who once lived to make a better world. The film personifies the ideals of the radical movements that swept Europe at the turn of the century.

The film directed by perhaps the best-known female director Margarethe von Trotta and featuring Barbara Sukowa as Luxemberg, avoids what might have been mere propaganda, not only to deal with history in all its messy complexities but also portray its heroine as a tragic figure who inadvertently unleashed the forces that destroyed her.

Rosa Luxemberg (1871-1919) was one of the most talented women of her era. Having been born in Russian Poland to a family of wealthy merchants, she became interested in socialism and, at 18, was forced to flee to Switzerland because of her revolutionaty activities.

A symbol of courage and rectitude, she fought against every prejudice and handicap. Born with a deformed foot, Luxemberg walked with a limp , and in the film she refers to herself as a 'lame duck' and was regarded as too young to be a serious political thinker.

Despite its focus on complex theoretical matters, the film however makes numerous transitions from the political to the personal. In one scene, Luxemberg is marched blindfolded into a room and forced to stand against a wall as the order "Fire!" is given. She flinches and her thoughts flash back to her childhood.