Based on a Book

Everything in Taliesin Jones's small-town life in Wales has suddenly become uncertain. His mother has run off with her hairdresser. His father has taken to talking to the walls, but at least he's talking, as his brother has gone entirely mute. At school, ... Read More

Everything in Taliesin Jones's small-town life in Wales has suddenly become uncertain. His mother has run off with her hairdresser. His father has taken to talking to the walls, but at least he's talking, as his brother has gone entirely mute. At school, Julie Dyer blows confusing smoke rings at him and Hoop the Mental says there is no God. When Taliesin tries to find this out for sure no one seems to have the answer-no one except Billy Evans, an old man with an exceptional and miraculous talent.

"A beautiful meditation on childhood. . . . Brook's voice has been plucked from the babbling tongues of his country and made new."(The Times, London)

"Very upright, very moral, very entertaining. . . . You'll find yourself seduced by the quiet power of the Welshman's prose, the subtlety of his narrative technique, with its onion-skin layers of meaning, sympathy, and revelation." (Time Out)

As with Star Wars, the George Lucas-produced Indiana Jones trilogy was not just a plaything for kids but an act of nostalgic affection toward a lost phenomenon: the cliffhanging movie serials of the past. Episodic in structure and with fate hanging in the... Read More

As with Star Wars, the George Lucas-produced Indiana Jones trilogy was not just a plaything for kids but an act of nostalgic affection toward a lost phenomenon: the cliffhanging movie serials of the past. Episodic in structure and with fate hanging in the balance about every 10 minutes, the Jones features tapped into Lucas's extremely profitable Star Wars formula of modernizing the look and feel of an old, but popular, story model. Steven Spielberg directed all three films, which are set in the late 1930s and early '40s: the comic book-like Raiders of the Lost Ark, the spooky, Gunga Din-inspired Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and the cautious but entertaining Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Fans and critics disagree over the order of preference, some even finding the middle movie nearly repugnant in its violence. (Pro-Temple of Doom people, on the other hand, believe that film to be the most disarmingly creative and emotionally effective of the trio.) One thing's for sure: Harrison Ford's swaggering, two-fisted, self-effacing performance worked like a charm, and the art of cracking bullwhips was probably never quite the iconic activity it soon became after Raiders. Supporting players and costars were very much a part of the series, too--Karen Allen, Sean Connery (as Indie's dad), Kate Capshaw, Ke Huy Quan, Amrish Puri, Denholm Elliot, River Phoenix, and John Rhys-Davies among them. Years have passed since the last film (another is supposedly in the works), but emerging film buffs can have the same fun their predecessors did picking out numerous references to Hollywood classics and B-movies of the past. --Tom Keogh