Screen:

...Buchanan's father is shown (after initial lack of understanding) coming to defend her honor...

...Since they are still touring nationally and will arrive ultimately in video or on PBS, they deserve mention...

...A child of the sixties, Sayles transcends the platitudes of sterile dissent and reactionary superpatriotism...

...The "find" of a recent season at the Royal Shakespeare Company, she has a memorable face...

...like Vanessa Redgrave's daughter, Natasha Richardson, she combines both angular cheekbones with a peachy complexion to project strength and grace...

...At the same time, there is no ambiguity about the evil of rape...

...Summer Story (from a Galsworthy tale) is set in England's Dartmoor...

...Matewan concerned a coal miners' strike in 1919...

...She terrifies the local police into trying to reestablish law and order (in the past, the sheriff has dismissed rape as ' 'boys having a little bit o' fun," or, like many in the town, has blamed the victims...

...They assume that they can treat her the same as all the other women about...

...You keep hoping that the obvious terrible thing won't happen...

...TOM O'BRIEN...

...Sayles's first strength as a director-or historian-lies in linking the wider class war with the class war in sports...

...She knows karate, and is on vacation from her law practice in Sydney...

...The actors, director Piers Haggard, and screenwriter Penelope Mortimer (writer of The Pumpkin Eater) have so beautifully collaborated in making this film that they breathe fresh life and a keen sense of pain into the plain, unadorned tale of a broken heart...

...It supplies classic love tragedy, whose only flaw is too slow an early pace...

...Once the ramifications of this role-switch become apparent, Shame is predictably melodramatic, but still very powerful...

...The rich mother of one of the rapists is shown threatening him with a boycott of his gas station...

...Better still is the period look (from production designer Nora Chavoosian), the sentimentality of the National Anthem (genuinely sung), the ugly anti-Semitism and red-baiting...

...Only this time she's a woman...

...Asta also bucks up the courage of one of them (Simone Buchanan) to press charges...

...But the film doesn't sentimentalize life on the farm, which is hearty but rugged...

...The dignity of this film lies in its.fairness and honesty...

...Another memorable heroine is Asta Cadell (Deborra-Lee Furness) in the Australian Shame...

...No one more embodies the conflict of honesty and anger over economic injustice than pitcher Eddie Cicotte (David Straitharn, who played a similar conflicted role as the sheriff in Matewan...

...as usual in a Western, the bad guys underestimate their new antagonist...

...Yet how often he succeeds-from the old style, thin-leathered baseball mitts, to spitballs (still legal), to the speed that dominated baseball before the coming of the livelier ball and Ruthean home runs...

...Their art recaptures the mood of the grand old ballads...

...He takes refuge at the Narracombe farm, owned by an aging widow (Susannah York) and her family, all complete with West Country burrs...

...No recent film-not even A Room with a View-has been so splendidly photographed...

...She alone is worth the price of several admissions...

...Sayles himself struts around as Ring Lardner and helps Terkel uncover the scandal...

...John Cusack as third baseman Buck Weaver, who knew of the fix but refused to play less than his best...

...Sweeney's performance is a sweet, sad lyric: his "Shoeless" Joe can't even sign a confession-not because he fears the consequences but from shame that as an illiterate hillbilly he can't even write his own name...

...Although the movement of custard and pie is slow as Wilby recuperates, the film's development is infused with high sexual tension, especially in the excellent sheep-shearing and dinner-dance scenes that come straight out of Myth...

...The film goes slightly slack about a third of the way through-the same problem as in Matewan...

...she quickly finds out that harassment and rape are the main pastimes of the town's young males...

...The film replays all the cliches of the traditional heroic Western and "macho'' motorbike film: a rural town, desert isolation, gangs of thugs roaming the streets and terrifying citizens, and a mysterious stranger who rides into town to confront them...

...Jodrell thus makes sure good and evil are not matters of gender...

...In a daring, rapid-fire opening, Sayles shows how the anger of the talented White Sox against their skinflint owner, Charlie Comiskey, moved them to take bribes to throw the championship...

...Joe (Jerome Flynn), the girl's local boyfriend, poses a menace to the budding love between her and Wilby that crosses both class and cultural lines...

...Eight Men Out includes references to the unrest and the subsequent "Red Scare" in which the first baseball commissioner, Judge "Kenesaw Mountain" Landis, so impressed corporate America with anti-labor rulings...

...Several fine foreign films premiered quietly this late summer...

...An Oxford chap on a pre-World War I holiday (James Wilby, previously in the Merchant-Ivory film, Maurice), injures his ankle while walking in Devon...

...Before long, he and a blue-eyed damsel (Imogen Stubbs) exchange little shocks of quiet, erotic electricity...

...Jackson, Sayles shows, was almost as innocent as the kid, but it didn't save him from being banned from professional baseball...

...Sayles's second directorial strength is his command of an ensemble of actors-Maggi Rienzi as Cicotte's wife...

...Directed by Steven Jodrell, it doesn't make all the men villains...

...He gets his finest bit role from a hammy Studs Terkel as journalist Hugh Fullerton, almost proud that such badness as a World Series fix could occur in Chicago...

...Most films about athletics are untrue both to sports and life: they emphasize sensational plays and leave out or trivialize the social context of sport itself...

...Like Bull Durham, Eight Men Out presents baseball not as momentarily glorious but consistently intense...

...he is too honest either to deny his love of the American heritage or to ignore its warts...

...Charlie Sheen as a happy-go-lucky, easily corruptible outfielder...

...it also raises issues of integrity and class war in the mode of moral tragedy...

...Sayles's problem lies with trying to tell too many stories at once: other ballplayers, their wives, the gamblers-are all given idiosyncracies that demand more space and time than the unmerciful frame of a two-hour film allows...

...Sayles cares so much about the real that he tries to fit top much in...

...But the weakness attests to Sayles's wide sympathies...

...and D. B. Sweeney as "Shoeless" Joe Jackson, of whom a young fan gets to ask the original question-"Say it ain't so, Joe...

...Stubbs stands out as the heroine, and brings rich depth to innocence...

...John Sayles, director of last year's Matewan, tackles the World Series scandal of 1919-the fix that cost eight Chicago "Black Sox" their careers...

...Asta is a sexy, punky blonde, geared up in leather...

...Sadly, the worst menace is from one of the lovers...

...it does...