Frank Abagnale Jr., played by Leonardo DiCaprio, passes himself off as an airline pilot in Catch Me If You Can.
Catch Me If You Can (PG-13)
Steven Spielberg's lighthearted comic drama, based on the true story of inventive con man Frank W. Abagnale Jr., was released last year on the heels of Minority Report and A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, two Spielberg projects with dark themes and serious social and political implications. The filmmaker's latest is a breezy, entertaining diversion driven by several nicely calibrated performances.
In 1964, disturbed by the breakup of his parents (Christopher Walken and Nathalie Baye), Abagnale (Leonardo DiCaprio) ran away to New York City from his New Rochelle, N.Y., home. A natural-born scammer, he passed millions of dollars' worth of phony checks over the next five years, and successfully masqueraded as a Pan Am pilot, a doctor and a lawyer. By the time he was 21, the charades were over, and he was imprisoned.
It's a cat-and-mouse story, with the elusive Abagnale aggressively pursued by humorless FBI agent Carl Hanratty (Tom Hanks). The art design and period details are impressive, with monochromatic schemes for the early scenes, candy colors for several interiors and a bad-taste funhouse bachelor pad that might have been ripped from the pages of Playboy in the 1960s.
The jazzy score, by longtime Spielberg collaborator John Williams, is appropriately whimsical, too. And the supporting cast is good, with Amy Adams as the Louisiana belle who falls for Abagnale, Martin Sheen as her Southern-gentleman attorney father, Jennifer Garner and James Brolin.
Rent it if you enjoy: Paper Moon, The Sting and other movies about likable con artists; DiCaprio.
DVD extras: The double-DVD edition, oddly, doesn't offer commentaries or deleted scenes. But a variety of short making-of-the-movie features include interviews with Spielberg and Abagnale. The latter - dashing, charismatic, and perhaps still running a scam game in regards to his past offenses - presents himself as the perpetrator of harmless, victimless crimes. Wonder what his former patients and legal clients might say?
Kandahar (Unrated)
This semi-biographical drama, which looks and feels like a documentary, centers on the troubled journey of Nafas (Niloufar Pazira), an Afghan refugee in Canada, who returns to her homeland in an effort to help her suicidal sister.
Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf (Gabbeh) offers a bleak, slow-moving portrait of life under Taliban rule in Afghanistan, a desolate, poor region where land mines are apparently unavoidable: In the most moving sequence, a group of crippled men hobble along to stake their claims on prosthetic limbs dropped down from the sky.
Rent it if you enjoy: Movies from the Middle East; socially and politically conscious filmmaking.
DVD extras: Commentary track by Pazira; Lifting the Veil, a Canadian-made documentary on Pazira; (print) interview with Makhmalbaf and essay by Pazira.
The Emperor's Club (PG-13)
Classics teacher and assistant headmaster William Hundert (Kevin Kline) clashes with a rebellious student at a tony private school in The Emperor's Club. The rather conventionally told drama, directed by Michael Hoffman (A Midsummer Night's Dream), is bookended by present-day segments but mostly is set in the late 1970s.
Hundert, a devotee of Roman and Greek culture and history, and moral-guidance master, as played by the overacting Kline, is a little bit Robin Williams, a little bit John Houseman. The professor's patience and mettle are tested with the arrival of Sedgewick Bell (Emile Hirsch), the unruly, disrespectful son of a West Virginia politician. Rules are bent, and life lessons are learned. Embeth Davidtz, Rob Morrow and Edward Herrmann round out the middling cast.
Rent it if you enjoy: Dead Poets Society; movies about troubled rich kids at elite private schools.
CLASSICS ON DVD
Several audio commentaries, and A&E documentary William Holden: An Untamed Spirit, are included in the DVD release of Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing. The 1955 forbidden-romance drama has Holden, as a married American journalist, falling for a Eurasian doctor and widow played by the Oklahoma-born Jennifer Jones. The screen classic, based on a true story, was shot on location in Hong Kong and nominated for eight Academy Awards. Oscars were awarded for the durable title song, Alfred Newman's score and the costume design.
Intrepid, brainy CIA analyst Jack Ryan, at the center of several military thrillers penned by Tom Clancy, was portrayed by Alec Baldwin in 1990's The Hunt For Red October, an intriguing piece of work directed by John McTiernan. The Clancy character was given new life when the more accomplished (and older) Harrison Ford assumed the role for Patriot Games (1992) and Clear and Present Danger (1994), both directed by Australian-born filmmaker Phillip Noyce. The interconnected thrillers are now available in Widescreen DVD editions, with skimpy extra features: McTiernan offers a commentary for Hunt, and new cast and crew interviews were done for all three movies.
