Movies and the moral adventure of life

"Whether writing about foreign films or blockbusters, Pulp Fiction or Ma Vie en Rose, Alan A. Stone shows us how great movies capture what it means to be human. Stone, a psychiatrist and scholar, judges films by the quality of their engagement with the universal struggle against the constraints of character and circumstance. With him, we applaud directors such as Sam Mendes, Marleen Gorris, and Wu Tian Ming who not only resist cynicism but offer us an enlarged sense of human possibility."--book jacket.