Film Reviews

TV writer Ji-ho (Jin-hie Park) has been secretly in love with Min-woo (Ki-woo Lee) for the last 10 years. After a night of binge-drinking, she wakes up to face the worst day of her life. She wakes up to find that she has just gotten fired for low viewer ratings. On her way home her purse then gets snatched and Ji-ho pursues the thief. Then suddenly, when things seem that they can’t go any worse, Ji-ho gets hit by a car. But the chain of unfortunate events suddenly turns out to be a God-sent present. The man who hit her with the car turns out to be the very man she’s been in love with all these years, Min-woo. She then pretends to have amnesia …

Two Supreme Court Justices have been assassinated. One lone law student has stumbled upon the truth. An investigative journalist wants her story. Everybody else wants her dead.

Menage begins as a comedy of sorts, but be warned: it develops into a very dark, very confusing probe into the seamier aspects of Parisian life. Gerard Depardieu plays a crude but charismatic thief, whose own gayness does not prevent his commiserating with those of the opposite sex. Miou-Miou and Michel Blanc are young, impoverished lovers who fall under Depardieu's influence. He gains their confidence by introducing them to kinky sex, then sucks them into a vortex of crime. Director Bertrand Blier, who in most of his films has explored the awesome power (rather than pleasure) of sex, nearly outdoes himself in Menage (aka Tenue de Soiree).

The story of seven scholars (including Danny Kaye and Benny Goodman) in search of an expert to teach them about swing music. They seem to have found the perfect candidate in winsome nightclub singer Honey Swanson (Virginia Mayo). But Honey's gangster boyfriend doesn't want to give her up.

Maria's family give her a puzzle for her 50th birthday, and she loves it. Not only does the patient housewife have fun solving the puzzle, she's also really good at them. Overflowing with enthusiasm for her new-found passion, she goes back to the shop where they bought the gift for another puzzle. There her eye is caught by a notice on the message board: Partner for puzzle tournament wanted. Maria musters her courage and, despite her family's misgivings, answers the announcement.

Slow Action, Ben Rivers’ first exhibition at Matt’s Gallery, is a post-apocalyptic science fiction film that brings together a series of four 16mm works which exist somewhere between documentary, ethnographic study and fiction. Continuing his exploration of curious and extraordinary environments, Slow Action applies the idea of island biogeography - the study of how species and eco-systems evolve differently when isolated and surrounded by unsuitable habitat - to a conception of the Earth in a few hundred years; the sea level rising to absurd heights, creating hyperbolic utopias that appear as possible future mini-societies. This series of constructed realities explores the environments of self-contained lands and the search for information to enable the reconstruction of soon to be lost worlds.

When Sanju a master safe cracker teams up with two dangerous criminals to commit one last heist. The robbery is successful and Sanju is given the task of hiding the money till things cool down and the booty can be split. Three months later, the associates return to collect their share of the loot, but Sanju refuses to even recognize them! They realize he enrolled into an accident and is suffering from strong amnesia and decide to stay with Sanju and his wife Neetu until Sanju remembers where he hid the money. What dangerous game is Sanju playing?

An investigation of the massacre of 24 men, women and children in Haditha, Iraq allegedly shot by 4 U.S. Marines in retaliation for the death of a U.S. Marine killed by a roadside bomb. The movie follows the story of the Marines of Kilo Company, an Iraqi family, and the insurgents who plant the roadside bomb.

Mourning the accidental death of his wife and having just moved to New York with his young son, laconic police psychologist Cal Jamison (Martin Sheen) is reluctantly drawn into a series of grisly, ritualistic murders involving the immolation of two youths.

Painter Francisco Goya faces a scandal involving his muse, who is labeled a heretic by a monk.

A criminal on the run cons his way into the wrong dinner party where the host is anything but ordinary.

As the English and French soldiers battle for control of the American colonies in the 18th century, the settlers and native Americans are forced to take sides. Cora and her sister Alice unwittingly walk into trouble but are reluctantly saved by Hawkeye, an orphaned settler adopted by the last of the Mohicans.

Billy Lo is a Hong Kong-based movie actor, who is a box office draw. His girlfriend, Ann Morris, is a singer who is also climbing to the top. Now it seems the syndicate wants Billy and Ann to join their "management firm". But Billy knows that they will be treated like property, so he refuses and tells her to do the same. So they try to "encourage" him to join but he still refuses. He would be advised that they will not stop, so he must stop them, permanently. He is even more hesitant to do that but when an attempt on his life is made, he fakes his death and alters his appearance, and decides to go after the syndicate; taking them out one at a time.

Eddie (Emile Charles) and Michael (Tony Forsyth) are two 16-year-old gay friends from Liverpool. Berated by his father for his camp behaviour, Eddie runs away from his Liverpool home and joins Michael, a streetwise hustler, who is also on the run. The boys witness the gangland murder of "Annabelle" (Robbie Coltrane), the transvestite hostess of Liverpool's Fruit Machine Club. Fearing for their lives, they are thrown into the arms of a gay opera singer and his manipulative manager. They wind up in Brighton, but the danger is not over.

The most unusual of all Bartas films, the pre-apocalyptic Seven Invisible Men (2005) starts off like a genre movie – a bunch of robbers trying to evade the police after stealing and selling off a car. It is only after about half an hour, when one of them arrives at a farm that is near completely severed from the rest of the world, that the film moves into the world of Bartas.