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The nineties was the heyday of the mid-level action hero. Jean Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal churned out a whole series of increasingly profitable action programmers in the early part of the decade. Seagal’s movies were wildly profitable for Warner Bros, while Van Damme had a home at Universal Pictures. Every studio wanted its own Jcvd or Seagal, with Paramount trying to launch Jeff Speakman with The Perfect Weapon (which has a devoted fan in our own writer Ej Tangonan) and Fox even trying with football player Howie Long in Firestorm. One studio that badly wanted their own action guy was New Line Cinema, but before they found their niche in the genre with Rumble in the Bronx and Mortal Kombat, they tried to launch two promising action heroes. One was Thomas Ian Griffith, whose (pretty awesome) action flick Excessive Force was only given a small regional release.

The James Bond franchise has come a long way, with 6 different actors portraying the iconic character til now, and Daniel Craig being the latest actor to portray the role of Special Agent 007. However, many fans of the age-old spy franchise believe that Pierce Brosnan is the greatest actor ever to don the role. The Irish actor became synonymous with the role and he attracted immense love and following from the fans of the franchise.

Pierce Brosnan in Tomorrow Never Dies. Credits: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc

Despite playing a major role in expanding the fan base of the character, some people are just not interested in watching the greatness of Agent 007 saving the day in style; Nicolas Meyers is one of those people. Surprisingly, he could not turn down to write a gripping script for Tomorrow Never Dies after he used his contacts to land him a job in the film.

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To state a very true, indisputable thing right up front: Pierce Brosnan is the best James Bond (in my opinion). What's more, Martin Campbell's 1995 entry "GoldenEye" is one of the three best of all the James Bond movies, and Roger Spottiswoode's 1997 film "Tomorrow Never Dies" is nothing to sneeze at. Indeed, watching "Tomorrow Never Died" in 2023 posits an eerily accurate trajectory of the future computer technology, and its Steve Jobs-like villain Elliot Carver (Jonathan Pryce) easily predicts the culture of I'm-always-right tech-bros we currently find ourselves mired in. 

Briefly, the villain in "Tomorrow Never Dies" seeks to digitally control the flow of information, making him a soft-spoken, cyber-jacked version of William Randolph Hearst. He aims to start a war between China and England, hoping to secure broadcasting rights in China for the rest of his life. In 1997, such a plot seemed both hopelessly nerdy and legitimately terrifying.

In 1989, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier disappointed the box office. Reeling from bad reviews, the film only grossed $49 million domestically from a $33 million budget. That’s a worrying figure for a franchise considering that the previous movie, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, had made a huge $133 million. It likely eventually eked out a profit, but it did badly enough that the studio was looking to reboot the series without any of the original stars by making a Starlet Academy movie. Harve Bennett, the producer of all the films since Star Trek II, thought this would be the way to continue the crew’s big-screen adventures, but Paramount thought differently. With Star Trek: The Next Generation picking up momentum on TV, it became clear that Captain Picard and company would eventually move to the big screen, but, given that the franchise’s 25th anniversary was right around the corner,...

The youngest of Bollywood’s famous Kapoor brothers, he did not have their one defining and enduring cinematic image – Raj’s naive "tramp" identity in the Charlie Chaplin tradition or Shammi’s Elvis-like jiving, rebellious "playboy" persona, but went to surpass both in sheer diversity of his acting.

With his copybook good looks, rakish smile, infectious charm, toothy grin and languid drawl, or the air of earnestness, playing romantic roles, be they of businessmen, police inspectors, college students, et al came naturally to him, but Shashi Kapoor went on to play more ‘common man’ roles, decadent princes, aging poets and even angels with the same charm and intensity.

Born on March 18, 1938 in the then Calcutta to Prithviraj Kapoor and Ramsarn ‘Rama’ Devi, Balbir Raj ‘Shashi’ Kapoor was destined to walk in his family’s footsteps on the silver screen.

Though he first appeared on screen as a child artiste in...

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“Brosnan Before Bond”

By Raymond Benson

In 1986, Pierce Brosnan almost became James Bond, nearly a decade before he actually did so. He had been cast to replace Roger Moore as the iconic 007, but at the last minute, NBC waved his contract for the television series Remington Steele at him, exercising the option to make another season. Brosnan was out, and Timothy Dalton was in.

And then… Remington Steele’s new season ended up consisting of only six episodes, finishing its run in early 1987. So, Brosnan had been baited and switched. Nevertheless, in the interim years between then and his appearance in GoldenEye (1995), the actor set about establishing himself as a leading man in feature films.

One of these early starring roles was in the 1988 production, The Deceivers, a British picture made by the elite Merchant Ivory Productions, and it was produced by Ismail Merchant himself.

Nicholas Meyer’s ‘other’ fantastic film project was ignored for all the wrong reasons; Pierce Brosnan fills a heroic leading role in a revisit of The Stranglers of Bombay, but filmed on location with great attention to authentic details. An officer of the East India Company detects an incredibly murderous cult of Kali-worshipping Thugs, a criminal underclass of thieves that practice ritual mass murder. The story has roots in history, snarled in colonial injustice and xenophobia. It’s a period picture unafraid to be controversial. Also starring Saeed Jaffrey and Helena Mitchell.

The Deceivers

Blu-ray

The Cohen Film Collection / Kino

1988 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 103 min. / Street Date November 16, 2021 / Available from Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Pierce Brosnan, Saeed Jaffrey, Shashi Kapoor, Helena Michell, Keith Michell, David Robb.

Cinematography: Walter Lassally

Art Directors: Gianfranco Fumagalli, Ram Yedekar

Film Editor: Richard Trevor

Original Music: John Scott

Written by Michael Hirst from the novel by John Masters

Produced by Ismail Merchant,...

This unique experience created a sense of family among us all and allowed us to meet the Bengali people as family. I am still processing all that I discovered in Bangladesh and how it changes my perception of the world as a large place filled with worthy and wonderful people.

Our Women’s Films Jury of Three

Bipasha Hayat

We formed a three person jury with myself and Bipasha Hayat, a Bengali cultural activist, freelance painter, actor, and playwright. She has had six solo and 74 painting exhibitions at home and abroad. She has acted in over 300 television plays, 12 stage plays and four feature films. She won the 17th Asian Art Biennal 2016 among other prizes. Her written books are Hridoy rajje and Ghum bhanga manusher golpo.

Our third member Bijaya Jena is a trained actress from Ftii, Pune, India who has acted in many Odia and Hindi films, and in Ismail Merchant...

Pierce Brosnan, who stars in AMC’s new Western series The Son, recently opened up about losing his wife and daughter to ovarian cancer. Look back on People’s 1992 cover story on the British actor, as he reflected on his wife’s memory four months after her death — and the profound impact she had on his life.

When His Agent Phoned Pierce Brosnan in early March to tell him that his latest film, The Lawnmower Man, was a box office hit—a Brosnan first—the 39-year-old Irish-born actor remembers how he “whooped and hollered” with his two boys, Christopher, 19, and Sean,...