Born with cerebral palsy, the 10th of 22 children of a Dublin bricklayer and his wife, Christy Brown was doomed to life as a vegetable by physicians in 1932. His strong-willed mother's love and faith encouraged him to overcome this label. At age seven, he made a mark with chalk grasped between the toes of his left foot, the only limb on his body he could control. With this proof of intelligence, his schooling begins, and aided by his loving family,...

J'accuse is a World War I drama considered to be one of the most technically advanced films of the era and the first major pacifist film. It was referred to by Gance as "a human cry against the bellicose din of armies." Stars Marise Dauvray as Edith, a young woman who is unhappily married to an older man, François (Séverin-Mars), but is actually in love with a young poet Jean Diaz (Romuald Joubé). Both Jean and François end up on the front lines...

Variety lights: A beautiful and ambitious young woman joins a traveling troupe of third-rate vaudevillians and inadvertently causes jealousy and emotional crises. The white sheik: During a day in their honeymoon, a couple is separated by the city's lust and the desires it produces. I vitelloni: Details a year in the life of five young men lingering in post-adolescent limbo, dreaming of adventure and escape from their small town and struggling to...

Freedom Rising is a fresh, intensely human account of how the Civil War transformed the nation's capital from the debating forum for a loose union of states into the seat of a forceful central government. Before 1861, Washington was a dusty, muddy city of 60,000, joked about by urban sophisticates from New York and Boston. But at the onset of war, thousands of soldiers, job seekers, nurses, good-time girls, gamblers, newly freed slaves-all kinds...