Film Reviews
The Passion of Joan of Arc |
A classic of the silent age, this film tells the story of the doomed but ultimately canonized 15th-century teenage warrior. On trial for claiming she'd spoken to God, Jeanne d'Arc is subjected to inhumane treatment and scare tactics at the hands of church court officials. Initially bullied into changing her story, Jeanne eventually opts for what she sees as the truth. Her punishment, a famously brutal execution, earns her perpetual martyrdom. |
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Bananas |
When a bumbling New Yorker is dumped by his activist girlfriend, he travels to a tiny Latin American nation and becomes involved in its latest rebellion. |
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Running with Scissors |
Young Augusten Burroughs absorbs experiences that could make for a shocking memoir: the son of an alcoholic father and an unstable mother, he's handed off to his mother's therapist, Dr. Finch, and spends his adolescent years as a member of Finch's bizarre extended family. |
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Wolf Hall |
England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the King dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years and marry Anne Boleyn. The Pope and most of Europe oppose him. Into this impass steps Thomas Cromwell: a wholly original man, a charmer, and a bully, both idealist and opportunist, astute in reading people, and implacable in his ambition. But Henry is volatile: one day tender, one day murderous. Cromwell helps him break the opposition, but what will be the price of his triumph? |
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Friends with Benefits |
Jamie is a New York-based executive recruiter who entices Dylan, an art director from Los Angeles, to take a job at the New York office of GQ magazine. Finding that they have much in common, the two become fast friends. Feeling jaded by a number of broken romances, Dylan and Jamie decide that they are ready to quit looking for true love and focus on having fun. However, complications unfold when the two best pals add sex to their relationship. |
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Snake in the Eagle's Shadow |
Everyone abuses and humiliates a downtrodden orphan (Chan) until he befriends an old man, who turns out to be the last master of the "snake fist" fighting style. Jackie becomes the old man's student and finds himself in battle with the master of the "eagle's claw" style, who has vowed to destroy the snake fist clan. |
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Grand Hotel |
A pompous, aging alcoholic and a tourettes-inflicted ten-year-old boy are forced to spend a week together at a high-end hotel. The only thing these two have in common is that they are both difficult to like. The hotel serves as their shared escape from the outside world and the problems it presents. |
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Tiresia |
Based on the legend of Tiresias, it tells of a transsexual who is kidnapped by a man and left to die in the woods. She is then saved by a family and receives the gift of telling the future. |
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Overnight |
Alternately hilarious and horrifying, Overnight chronicles one man's misadventures of making a Hollywood movie. It starts out as a rags to riches story as Troy Duffy, a Boston-bred bartender, sells his first screenplay for The Boondock Saints. |
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Together |
Elisabeth leaves her abusive and drunken husband Rolf, and goes to live with her brother, Göran. The year is 1975 and Göran lives in a commune called Together. Living in this leftist commune Elisabeth learns that the world can be viewed from different perspectives. |
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The Niklashausen Journey |
Can a small group of people start a proletarian revolution, asks the "Black Monk" in a leather jacket. The medieval shepherd, Hans Boehm, claims to have been called by the Virgin Mary to create a revolt against the church and the landowners. The "Black Monk" suggests that he would have more success if he dressed up Johanna and had her appear as the Virgin Mary. |
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Lightnin' |
Set in a hotel straddling the border between California and Nevada, this early John Ford comedy follows a female hotel owner's efforts to turn a profit and get some work out of her husband. |
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A Christmas Tale |
When their regal matriarch falls ill, the troubled Vuillard family come together for a hesitant Christmastime reunion. Among them is rebellious ne'er-do-well Henri and the uptight Elizabeth. Together under the same roof for the first time in many years, their intricate, long denied resentments and yearnings emerge again. |
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A Night for Dying Tigers |
The night before Jack (Gil Bellows) is slated to begin a five-year prison sentence for murder, his wife, Melanie (Jennifer Beals), and assorted siblings gather for a dinner to bid Jack farewell and good luck on his trip up the river. But the party slides into a bitter fight over the bad behavior of Jack's brothers (John Pyper-Ferguson and Tygh Runyan) and sister Karen (Lauren Lee Smith). Terry Miles directs this dark comic drama. |
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Terminal USA |
Terminal USA is the story of a Japanese-American family with more than their fair share of quirks. Ma (Sharon Omi) is stealing grandpa's morphine, Airhead sister (Jenny Woo) is having sex with the family lawyer, One brother (Jon Moritsugu) gets perfect grades but is hiding a secret gay love of skinheads, and the other brother (also Jon Moritsugu) is a wastoid druggie. The tension leads to an explosion of absurd violence as crazier and crazier things happen to the family. |
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