Articles by Laura Francis

Harsh Realm: The Series

PUBLISHED Sep 1, 2004

For about two minutes in the fall of 1999, Chris Carter's Harsh Realm debuted on the Fox network and except for the creator, the cast's fam...

Trailervision: Why Can't I Be a Movie Star?

Albert Nerenberg

PUBLISHED Sep 1, 2004

Celebrity, according to cultural critic Cintra Wilson, is a virulent killer of fundamental values and the only way to control it is to "qui...

The Door in the Floor

Tod Williams

PUBLISHED Aug 1, 2004

The Door in the Floor chronicles a fateful summer in the splintering lives of an East Hampton couple still struggling to cope with the trag...

Riding Giants

Stacey Peralta

PUBLISHED Aug 1, 2004

Surfing has come a long way since Endless Summer, the 1960 documentary by Bruce Brown that tracked two surfers as they sought out the perfe...

Cold Mountain

Anthony Minghella

PUBLISHED Aug 1, 2004

Somewhere in the first hour of Anthony Minghella's intimate epic Cold Mountain, our heroine, Ada Monroe (Nicole Kidman), is lowered down a...

The Barbarian Invasions

Denys Arcand

PUBLISHED Aug 1, 2004

This year's Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film, The Barbarian Invasions takes its title from remarks by an intellectual at the beginning of...

The Human Stain

Robert Benton

PUBLISHED Aug 1, 2004

Coleman Silk (Anthony Hopkins) is a 70-ish classics professor and the dean of a small New England college who is driven from office when he...

Semisonic Drummer Takes Aim

BOOK

PUBLISHED Aug 1, 2004

It’s 1998, your band’s record is on the top spot of the Billboard chart and you are miserable. Such is the life of a rock star according to...