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Heart Videos

Love stories from the heart on video.

Braveheart

Braveheart A stupendous historical saga, Braveheart won five Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director for star Mel Gibson. He plays William Wallace, a 13th-century Scottish commoner who unites the various clans against a cruel English King, Edward the Longshanks (Patrick McGoohan). The scenes of hand-to-hand combat are brutally violent, but they never glorify the bloodshed. There is such enormous scope to this story that it works on a smaller, more personal scale as well, essaying love and loss, patriotism and passion. Extremely moving, it reveals Gibson as a multitalented performer and remarkable director with an eye for detail and an understanding of human emotion. (His first directorial effort was 1993's Man Without a Face.) The film is nearly three hours long and includes several plot tangents, yet is never dull. This movie resonates long after you have seen it, both for its visual beauty and for its powerful story. --Rochelle O'Gorman

Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

Heart Is a Lonely Hunter This quiet, sentimental 1968 drama based on the Carson McCullers novel is considered a classic contemporary coming-of-age film about alienation and love. Alan Arkin (The In-Laws) stars as a kind, but lonely deaf-mute who befriends a lonely teenage girl in his boarding house. Set in the deep South, the film depicts a wistful small-town life with an undercurrent of turmoil and intolerance. It features a standout performance by Arkin and the debut of Sondra Locke (Bronco Billy, Sudden Impact) as two fundamentally lonely people who find solace in themselves as they reach out to each other. --Robert Lane

Music of the Heart

Music of the Heart Why, you might ask, would Wes Craven direct a conventional biopic about Roberta Guaspari, a divorced mother of two who created an acclaimed music program in East Harlem's troubled school system? After all, Craven built his career on Freddy Krueger and the Scream trilogy, and you won't find razor-tipped gloves or a single drop of blood in Music of the Heart. All Craven has to do is provide a safe working environment for Meryl Streep (who earned an obligatory Oscar nomination), sublimate his deft directorial style, and surrender to the banalities of Pamela Gray's screenplay, which would've played more effectively on cable TV. To be fair, Music of the Heart (partially inspired by the 1996 documentary Small Wonders) serves its purpose quite nicely. Streep is flawless in a non-showy role, and the story of Guaspari's celebrated violin training program provides the requisite rush of inner-city inspiration. As a fact-based companion to Mr. Holland's Opus, the film is less effective but similarly engaging; you'd have to be cold-hearted to dismiss it altogether. It's best when focusing on Guaspari's school program and the 10-year struggle to keep it alive; the drama falters when dealing half-heartedly with her tentative relationships, notably with a journalist (Aidan Quinn) who shies from commitment. And Craven? He seems content to direct by the numbers here, leaving inspiration on the screen while forfeiting his own. --Jeff Shannon

Where the Heart Is

Where the Heart Is Not to be confused with the 1990 comedy flop featuring Uma Thurman, this Where the Heart Is boasts a winning performance from Natalie Portman. Novalee Nation (Portman), a pregnant teenager from Tennessee, is bound for California with her worthless boyfriend, Willy Jack (Dylan Bruno). A pit stop at an Oklahoma Wal-Mart proves fateful when Willy Jack abandons her there. She secretly sets up camp at the megastore and spends her days meeting with kindly booster Sister Husband (Stockard Channing) and eccentric librarian Forney Hall (James Frain). Her life takes another turn after she gives birth in the store (clean up, aisle six!) and finds a best friend in sassy nurse Lexie Coop (Ashley Judd). Meanwhile, Willy Jack has found a talent agent (Joan Cusack) and tries to make some life changes of his own. Where The Heart Is offers charming, folksy fun; homespun wisdom; and an obstacle course of plot development (if the Wal-Mart angle weren't enough, there's also a kidnapping, a tornado, and at least half a dozen other major events thrown in). Director Matt Williams, who produced the popular sitcoms Roseanne and Home Improvement, takes television's cut-to-commercial route to make giant leaps in space and time from scene to scene. It's disorienting, but the remarkable female cast (which includes Sally Field in a cameo) lends plausiblilty to the muddle, even when you don't think anything more could possibly happen. --Shannon Gee

Purple Heart / Movie

Purple Heart / Movie One of Hollywood's most striking films of World War II has very little war in it, yet it whips up a fearsome power. A U.S. bomber that took part in the Doolittle raid on Tokyo crash-lands in Japanese-occupied China afterward. Captured, the officers and crew are hauled before a Japanese court and tried for war crimes. The trial is illegal and stacked against the Americans from the outset. But that doesn't stop it from developing into a fierce duel of nerves and icy politesse, especially between the U.S. commander (Dana Andrews) and the Japanese general (Richard Loo), who is the chief architect of the strategy to break the Americans and learn how the raid was carried out. The story for The Purple Heart was written by none other than 20th Century-Fox studio chief Darryl F. Zanuck, resurrecting one of his pseudonyms--Melville Crossman--from the days when he used to crank out gangster pictures and Rin Tin Tin movies for Warner Bros. Did it have any corollary in fact? Home front audiences in 1944 were ready to believe the worst, and what The Purple Heart asked them to believe was both terrible and inspiring. The film was directed, pungently, by Lewis Milestone, a two-time Oscar winner and Hollywood's most honored chronicler of the horrors of war (e.g., All Quiet on the Western Front); cinematographer Arthur Miller, Fox's master of black and white, worked wonders with the claustrophobic interiors. The solid cast also includes Richard Conte, Sam Levene, and Farley Granger. --Richard T. Jameson

Dan Marino-Heart of a Champion

Dan Marino-Heart of a Champion No description

Heart & Souls

Heart & Souls Robert Downey Jr. has never been more charming than in this comedy about a yuppie who is revisited in adulthood by the spirits of four people who had been his friends as a child. The ghosts (Kyra Sedgwick, Charles Grodin, Alfre Woodard, Tom Sizemore) all have unfinished business in this world before they can move on to the next, and Downey's character agrees to let them inhabit his body while they sort it all out. The appealing cast alone strongly recommends this movie, but Downey's remarkable facility for physical comedy--manifesting the personalities of his supernatural pals as they possess him--is a riot. Elisabeth Shue makes the best of her part as the hero's girlfriend; Leaving Las Vegas was still ahead of her, but one can see her talent straining to get out here. The DVD release has a widescreen presentation, production notes, theatrical trailer, biographies of the cast, closed captioning, an optional French soundtrack and Spanish subtitles, and Dolby sound. --Tom Keogh

Young at Heart

Young at Heart This 1954 musical remake of Four Daughters stars Doris Day as a well-bred New England woman who marries a chip-on-his-shoulder musician (Frank Sinatra). Lots of tears, yes, but this version of Fannie Hurst's novel is considerably cheered up from the 1938 tearjerker. Dorothy Malone and Elizabeth Fraser play Day's sisters (a fourth sister present in Four Daughters was written out), Robert Keith is the paterfamilias to a bunch of musical prodigies, and Gig Young is entertaining as the composer-boarder who tries deflecting the sisters' interest in him by bringing Sinatra home one day. Both Day and Sinatra really shine in this, and the songs include the Johnny Richards-Caroline Leigh title tune, which became part of Sinatra's standard repertoire. --Tom Keogh

Untamed Heart

Untamed Heart If you're a die-hard romantic with a soft spot for three-hanky weepers, this well-acted love story from 1993 will be just what the doctor ordered. It's about a waitress named Caroline (Marisa Tomei) who works the graveyard shift in a Minneapolis diner, where the silent, introverted Adam (Christian Slater) works as a dishwasher and janitor. Only Caroline manages to bring the solitary Adam out of his shell, and when he rescues her from an assault, their tentative friendship slowly blossoms into mutual trust and love. Adam has a weak heart and desperately needs a heart transplant, but a story told to him by orphanage nuns--that he was raised in the jungle with the powerful heart of a baboon--makes him feel invincible. This sets the stage for a tender and tragic love story that director Tony Bill handles as a delicate balance of blue-collar reality and misty-eyed fairy tale, and the quiet chemistry between Tomei and Slater makes it work. If you don't get a little choked up by the movie's heartfelt conclusion, you just might need a heart transplant yourself. --Jeff Shannon

Where the Heart Is (2000) (Rpkg)

Where the Heart Is (2000) (Rpkg) Not to be confused with the 1990 comedy flop featuring Uma Thurman, this Where the Heart Is boasts a winning performance from Natalie Portman. Novalee Nation (Portman), a pregnant teenager from Tennessee, is bound for California with her worthless boyfriend, Willy Jack (Dylan Bruno). A pit stop at an Oklahoma Wal-Mart proves fateful when Willy Jack abandons her there. She secretly sets up camp at the megastore and spends her days meeting with kindly booster Sister Husband (Stockard Channing) and eccentric librarian Forney Hall (James Frain). Her life takes another turn after she gives birth in the store (clean up, aisle six!) and finds a best friend in sassy nurse Lexie Coop (Ashley Judd). Meanwhile, Willy Jack has found a talent agent (Joan Cusack) and tries to make some life changes of his own. Where The Heart Is offers charming, folksy fun; homespun wisdom; and an obstacle course of plot development (if the Wal-Mart angle weren't enough, there's also a kidnapping, a tornado, and at least half a dozen other major events thrown in). Director Matt Williams, who produced the popular sitcoms Roseanne and Home Improvement, takes television's cut-to-commercial route to make giant leaps in space and time from scene to scene. It's disorienting, but the remarkable female cast (which includes Sally Field in a cameo) lends plausiblilty to the muddle, even when you don't think anything more could possibly happen. --Shannon Gee

Thunder Heart

Thunder Heart Tough but moving, Thunderheart is an unusual story about an arrogant FBI agent (Val Kilmer) who participates in a federal investigation of a murder on an Oglala Sioux reservation. Kilmer's character is part Sioux himself, a detail that leaves him cold as he sets about pushing his way through the community to find facts on the case. In time, however, he begins to feel an ethnic tug and grows increasingly sympathetic to the locals and hostile toward his fellow G-men, much to the dismay of his agency mentor (Sam Shepard). The script is based on real events that occurred on the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1975 in South Dakota (involving an armed standoff between Indian activists and the FBI, an event that prompted Thunderheart director Michael Apted to make a companion documentary, Incident at Oglala). The conclusion of Thunderheart feels like politically charged whimsy, but the real strength of the film is Kilmer's outstanding performance as a man in transformation. Apted's clear-eyed depiction of the Sioux's spiritual and cultural continuity with the past has none of the cloying romanticism of other films about Indians. Produced by Robert De Niro. --Tom Keogh

Places in the Heart

Places in the Heart No description

Cross My Heart

Cross My Heart No description

Holiday Heart (2000)

Holiday Heart (2000) In a break from his usual he-man roles, Ving Rhames takes on the persona of "Holiday Heart," a church choir-directing female impersonator who is openly gay, religious, and alone. His loneliness ebbs when he rescues Wanda (Alfre Woodard) and her daughter from her drug-abusing boyfriend. He invites the pair to live free of charge in the duplex across the hall from his own and they form a family of sorts. But Wanda hooks up with a well-heeled drug dealer (Mykelti Williamson) and soon falls back into drug addiction, leaving Holiday to give up his own dreams and take care of the girl. Robert Townsend (Hollywood Shuffle) directed this R-rated cable movie that earned Woodard a Golden Globe nomination for her stark performance as a woman whose intelligence and love for her daughter are no match for the demons of her addiction. Screenwriter Cheryl L. West, who adapted her stage play, gets credit for combining the sentiment of a family story with the harshness of street life. The film's noble desire not to pretty things up does make for some tough scenes and a less-than-happy ending--thus the restricted rating. But the film has its fun moments, too, many of them thanks to Holiday's mincing fellow impersonator Jambalaya Blue, played with relish by Jonathan Wallace. --Kimberly Heinrichs

Heart Beat

Heart Beat For a man who affected two generations of the counterculture--the beatniks and the hippies that followed them--there's been surprisingly little written by Neal Cassady, despite the fact that he served as muse to both Jack Kerouac and Ken Kesey. In this fictionalized film, Nick Nolte plays Cassady, a man with huge appetites for all that life has to offer. He befriends the confused, questing Kerouac (John Heard), imparts wisdom, and helps Kerouac take on the world on his own terms--and write On the Road. But their friendship is tested by the relationship they share with the woman who would eventually become Cassady's wife, Caroline (played by Sissy Spacek). For a film about two such freewheeling characters, there's surprisingly little real life to this film, though Nolte attacks the role with vigor. Director John Byrum would go on to butcher The Razor's Edge with Bill Murray a few years later. --Marshall Fine

American Heart

American Heart Jeff Bridges may be the American film actor with the most unseen great performances to his credit. Near the top of the list of Bridges's most overlooked films is this one, the first fiction film by documentary maker Martin Bell (Streetwise). Bridges plays Jack, an ex-con fresh out of prison and back in Seattle, where he is joined by Nick (Edward Furlong), a teenage son he barely knows. Nick wants nothing more than to spend time with Jack, to feel like a family. But Jack can barely cope with the concept of holding a job and staying out of trouble; he can hardly take care of himself, let alone be responsible for a teenager. Bell shows the toll on both as they slowly develop a bond and, after several false starts, learn to trust and care for each other. Bridges is magnificent as this loner who must learn to trust feelings he'd given up on years before. It's an involving and tragic tale. --Marshall Fine

Love & Romance

Let Romance Motivate Us
All of us need motivation. We eat because we feel hungry. We drink water because we are thirsty. We do everything in life for a reason. [ continued ]