Free Republic

AP) All those "Star Wars" geeks, who've been waiting for weeks outside movie theaters with their Yoda sleeping bags and their homemade lightsabers, finally have a film that's worthy of their perseverance. The Force is strong with "Episode III — Revenge of the Sith," the sixth and final piece in George Lucas' galactic saga, which represents a welcome return to the ideas and the spirit that made his original "Star Wars" a pop-culture juggernaut 28 years ago. The circle is now complete, as Lucas' characters are fond of saying, and much of the film's joy comes from watching these familiar...

Revenge of the Republicans Star Wars' Lucas draws parallels between U.S. politics and rise of the Empire CANNES -- Star Wars is a wake-up call to Americans about the erosion of democratic freedoms under George W. Bush, George Lucas said yesterday. Lucas, responding to a question at a Cannes Film Festival press conference, said he first wrote the framework of Star Wars in 1971 when reacting to then U.S. president Richard Nixon and the on-going events of the Vietnam War. But the story still has relevance today, he said, and is part of a pattern he has noticed in his...

CANNES, France (AP) -- ``The Pianist,'' Roman Polanski's highly personal film about the Holocaust, won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival on Sunday. The film stars Adrien Brody as a brilliant Polish pianist who manages to escape the Warsaw ghetto. As boy in Poland, Polanski himself survived the Krakow ghetto but lost his mother at a Nazi camp. In a year of especially high-quality films, second place, or the grand prize, went to ``The Man Without a Past'' by Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki, a whimsical tale of an amnesia victim who rediscovers life and love in the slums...