Film Reviews

Autobots and Decepticons are at war, with humans on the sidelines. Optimus Prime is gone. The key to saving our future lies buried in the secrets of the past, in the hidden history of Transformers on Earth.

On September 15, 1963, a bomb destroyed a black church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four young girls who were there for Sunday school. It was a crime that shocked the nation--and a defining moment in the history of the civil-rights movement. Spike Lee re-examines the full story of the bombing, including a revealing interview with former Alabama Governor George Wallace.

A horror film festival, held in a theater which was once the scene of a tragic fire, turns into a real life horror show.

A mystery woman is a murder suspect's only alibi for the night of his wife's death. Based on a story by noir scribe Cornell Woolrich.

Samantha MacKenzie, the daughter of the president of the United States, arrives at college with a group of Secret Service agents. Samantha, however, resents their presence and decides she wants to attend school just like a normal student. Her father agrees to recall the agents but secretly assigns James, an undercover agent, to pose as a student. They fall in love, but their romance is jeopardized when Samantha learns James' true identity.

A smart teenage girl comes of age in a small town with her self-centered parents who had her when they were teenagers.

Ireland will never be the same after Rawhead Rex, a particularly nasty demon, is released from his underground prison by an unwitting farmer. The film follows Rex's cross country rampage, while a man struggles to stop it.

Teens P.J. and Goose get their thrills on BMX bikes, performing hair-raising tricks all across Sydney, Australia. Along with their new friend Judy, they discover a box of walkie-talkies -- and find out that a gang of criminals intends to use them to monitor police signals during a bank robbery. When the young trio snatches the devices, it propels them on a hair-raising adventure in which their pedaling skills might just save their necks.

Nostalgia is Takashi Miike’s favorite film of his considerable body of work. Including biographical elements, Nostalgia centers around the home and school of a young boy, whose family mix the violent and dysfunctional with the comic and the loveable. Though containing elements of the sudden and shocking brutality that many associate with this director, Young Thugs – Nostalgia is more concerned with a child’s moment of leaving the internalized world of fantasy, and passing on eagerly to the next stage of life. A wonderful, touching, startling vision that is uniquely Miike’s.

Captain Drummond and his girlfriend want to marry but a hidden treasure in the house in which they want to celebrate their marriage is complicating the situation. (Volker Boehm)

In this little Provencal village, a new baker, Aimable, settles down. His wife Aurelie is beautiful and much younger than he. She departs with a shepherd the night after Aimable produces his first breads. Aimable is so afflicted that he can not work anymore. Therefore, the villagers, who initially laughed at his cuckoldry, take the matter very seriously (they want the bread) and organize a plan to find Aurelie and to bring her back to the bakery.

Derrick De Marney finds himself in a 39 Steps situation when he is wrongly accused of murder. While a fugitive from the law, De Marney is helped by heroine Nova Pilbeam, who three years earlier had played the adolescent kidnap victim in Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much. The obligatory "fish out of water" scene, in which the principals are briefly slowed down by a banal everyday event, occurs during a child's birthday party. The actual villain, whose identity is never in doubt (Hitchcock made thrillers, not mysteries) is played by George Curzon, who suffers from a twitching eye. Curzon's revelation during an elaborate nightclub sequence is a Hitchcockian tour de force, the sort of virtuoso sequence taken for granted in these days of flexible cameras and computer enhancement, but which in 1937 took a great deal of time, patience and talent to pull off. Released in the US as The Girl Was Young, Young and Innocent was based on a novel by Josephine Tey.

Police detective Joe Leland investigates the murder of a homosexual man. While investigating, he discovers links to official corruption in New York City in this drama that delves into a world of sex and drugs.

The Wong family kung fu school gets smacked around by a rival school. Wong Fei-hong gets fed up with the abuse and goes to learn from his fathers master. After one of the rival schools members kills some of the towns people Wong Fei-hong becomes enraged trains even more comes back and gets his revenge.

Geeky teenager David and his popular twin sister, Jennifer, get sucked into the black-and-white world of a 1950s TV sitcom called "Pleasantville," and find a world where everything is peachy keen all the time. But when Jennifer's modern attitude disrupts Pleasantville's peaceful but boring routine, she literally brings color into its life.