Steven Spielberg

Steven Spielberg's ``Saving Private Ryan'' graphically examined the horrors U.S. soldiers faced fighting World War II in Europe. Terrence Malick's ``The Thin Red Line,'' based on James Jones' novel, vividly depicts the brutalities our men endured in the Pacific theater.Movies made about World War II in the Pacific - starting with 1942's ``Wake Island'' - have been vastly different in tone and style from ones made about fighting the Nazis. And for good reason - it was a different world. Not only were the soldiers fighting the Japanese, they also had to combat disease, bugs, heat and starvation.

WASHINGTON -- Even as he was being honored last night at the Smithsonian Institution for his filmmaking and humanitarian efforts, Steven Spielberg reminded his audience that all the well-intentioned movies in the world are of little consequence when intolerance reigns and guns are readily available."

HOLLYWOOD -- Filmmakers sometimes go overboard in using digital effects, says production designer Eugenio Zanetti. An example is "The Haunting," the summer movie Zanetti designed for DreamWorks about a haunted house.The $80 million film, directed by Jan De Bont, garnered lots of attention for its spectacular sets and special effects. But the movie did not do well financially, and many critics said it paled in comparison to the much less explicit original, made in 1963 and directed by Robert Wise.

One of the most remarkable things about 1997 was that two prominent white filmmakers -- both directors who can call their own shots -- made films featuring African-Americans in prominent roles. And, because those filmmakers were Steven Spielberg and Quentin Tarantino, both approached their subjects in totally different ways.Spielberg, who directed "Amistad" after producer Debbie Allen spent more than a dozen years shopping the project to Hollywood studios, filmed the African characters of the film at a reverent, painterly distance, his respect often approaching worship.

"Saving Private Ryan," the highly anticipated World War II drama by Steven Spielberg, may be the director's masterwork, even outpacing the accomplishment of "Schindler's List." It is unquestionably the purest film Spielberg has made since "Jaws."The movie pulses with raw, vital power from its very beginning, which takes place on June 6, 1944 -- D-Day -- at Omaha Beach in Normandy, France. A boatload of Army Rangers is heading toward shore, watchful and tense, praying, throwing up. Their leader, Capt.

The script is pure Hollywood: Stranger comes to down-on-its-luck town, gives locals a sense of self-worth, town becomes respectable, hails its new hero.In Silver Spring, the hero is Hollywood, more specifically the American Film Institute, which will try to take a derelict, 70-year-old art-deco movie theater and turn it into a mecca for international and arts cinema.AFI was selected over three other candidates to become the operator of the Silver Theater, at the heart of a planned $321 million downtown renewal project.

Richard "Herk" Herklotz remembers the barrage balloons thick over the vast D-Day fleet and the bodies thick in the water as his landing craft sped toward Omaha Beach."

Remembering an old friend; Roommate: In Palestine in the 0) '30s, Herbert Froehlich shared a room with a Swede named Wallenberg Raoul Wallenberg.Herbert Froehlich's roommate moved out in 1936, yet all these years later, the man is never far from Froehlich's thoughts. "I think about him day and night," Froehlich said on a recent afternoon in his Pikesville apartment.In the Palestine town of Haifa in 1935, Froehlich was just one of thousands of Jewish refugees desperately searching for lodging.

Much is being made of the first 25 minutes of "Saving Private Ryan," the new World War II drama directed by Steven Spielberg. The sequence, which depicts the landing of American troops at Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944, is swiftly attaining legendary status.The passage is a small masterpiece, a discrete set piece of power and terrible grace within the larger movie. Filmgoers may take or leave that movie, but they cannot deny the force of those 25 minutes. Spielberg isn't content merely to show us that blood was shed that day - he spurts it onto the camera lens.

Hey, dinosaurs are people too, you know.You think they like eating all those human beings in Steven Spielberg's movies? Of course they don't. They're just trying to be good parents and do their part for the ecology. Hell, most of them probably belong to the Sierra Club.Rest assured. All your old favorites from "Jurassic Park" are back in "The Lost World." There are T-Rexes in spades and the velociraptors are as lethal as ever. But this time around Spielberg is striking a bargain. Before thrilling you with dinosaur mayhem, you've got to endure the lecture about animal rights and corporate greed and yadayayada.

When Jonathan Pryce's Sam Lowry, the bureaucrat at the center of Terry Gilliam's mad chef d'oeuvre, Brazil (1985), goes to work in the Department of Information Retrieval, his office resembles a badly multiplexed movie theater. Saturday at 10:15 a.m., in the Wheeler Auditorium of the Enoch Pratt Free Library downtown, the Pratt's Film Talk series will present Brazil - and with the fate of the Senator uncertain (anyone who hasn't seen the new print of Akira Kuroswa's Rashomon should rush there now)

Starring Harrison Ford, Cate Blanchett, Shia LaBeouf, Karen Allen Directed by Steven Spielberg Paramount Home Entertainment $29.95 (Blu-ray, $39.95) *** dvds More than a quarter-century after first bringing the good Dr. Jones to movie screens, Harrison Ford and director Steven Spielberg are back with a new entry. This time, it's those evil Russkies (in the person of Cate Blanchett and an accent straight out Boris and Natasha's neighborhood) doing the dirty deed. They're after a bunch of crystal skulls, talismans of extraterrestrial origin that wield all manner of world-conquering powers.

Dolly Parton has picked out her shoes, her dress and of course, her wig. But she isn't giving much away about the get-up she'll be sporting when she becomes a recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors next Sunday. What she does reveal, is that her dress - created for this occasion by Robert Bahar, who designs her costumes - is a flowing white gown with a train. "If I can keep that president off of my train that'll be good. I don't want to have to slap that Texas guy. `Get off my dress, cowboy!

PRIME-TIME TELEVISION MIGHT SEEM like the last realm in which one would expect to find historical truth. Three decades of network docudramas carelessly mixing fiction and fact on everyone from Thomas Jefferson to the Kennedys of Massachusetts is largely responsible for that. But tonight on the Discovery cable channel comes Munich: The Real Assassins, a British documentary that goes a long way toward setting the record straight on the 1970's Israeli campaign to kill PLO operatives that became the basis for the controversial Steven Spielberg film, Munich.

The Tina Turner who showed up at the White House yesterday was subdued in comparison with the performer who has been electrifying concert stages since the 1960s. Still, she lit up a reception celebrating her and the four other recipients of this year's Kennedy Center honors - Robert Redford, Tony Bennett, Suzanne Farrell and Julie Harris. "I'm very excited," Turner told reporters. President Bush drew some laughs when he noted of Turner, "People stand in wonder at the natural skill, the energy and sensuality, and the most famous legs in show business."

NEW YORK - Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds marks a turning point in pop culture. America's top commercial moviemaker has sensed that the atrocities of 9/11 and the turmoil of its aftermath must be used as reference points even for escapist movies, no matter how great the risk of exploitation. Based on H.G. Wells' 1898 novel about Martians crushing everything in their path as they traverse the Earth in three-legged, multi-tentacled war machines called Tripods, the movie is at its best when it revamps the basic elements of Wells' primal space-invasion plot.

The reality show Who Wants to Marry My Dad? (10:05 p.m.-11 p.m., WBAL, Channel 11) returns for a second summer. This time, the three adult daughters of Marty Okland check out 13 women to decide which one is best for their father. We're not sure what happens if Dad disagrees, but the network promises that the six-episode series will conclude with a proposal. At a glance According to Jim (9 p.m.-9:30 p.m., WMAR, Channel 2) - Cheryl's (Courtney Thorne-Smith) bragging results in more than she can handle when her snobby cousin Mindy (guest star Rachael Harris)

ARROMANCHES, France - On a hauntingly serene morning that provided a sharp contrast to what French President Jacques Chirac called "the dark night of oblivion" 60 years ago, world leaders yesterday commemorated the bloody D-Day invasion that led to victory in World War II. Led by Chirac and President Bush, the cliff-top ceremony was attended by thousands of American veterans, some of whom had not returned since they glimpsed France's Normandy coast from...

LOUISVILLE, Ky. - The name sounds as if it came straight from a corner of the Bronx, while the connections feature a splash of glitter straight from Hollywood. Atswhatimtalknbout is one of the leading contenders in the Kentucky Derby on Saturday at Churchill Downs. He is owned, in part, by six Hollywood executives known collectively as Biscuit Stables because of their involvement in the movie Seabiscuit. The group includes Steven Spielberg, who has been spotted on TV wearing an "Ats- whatimtalknbout" hat at Los Angeles Lakers games.

Steven Spielberg's E.T. may have premiered on DVD this week, but watching it at home you miss the surge of group feeling that you experience in a theater because of how lovingly Spielberg focuses an audience's attention on the most benign alien in movie history. So the Senator Theatre is offering a great pre-Halloween gift with its free screening of E.T. today at noon, preceded by its annual costume parade (co-sponsored by the Belvedere Improvement Association). No advance tickets required.