Film Reviews

When young Turkish talent Kutlug Ataman wanted to make a film about transvestites, the first location he had in mind was Istanbul. As he developed the script, his thought was to place these marginal characters, who are subject to societal prejudices in an environment where there is already discrimination, would add dramatic effect. Supported by funding from German sources, Ataman set his story in Berlin, inside the community of "guest workers" where Turkish transvestites are shunned not only by Germans, but by their own kind as well. The result is a strong film with moments of tenderness, emotion and laughter juxtaposed with the harsh realities of life for those who dare to be different. 16 year old Murat (Baki Davrak) is a Turk who is curious about gay life and eventually submerges himself in the gay hustler and transvestite subculture.

Murder By Proxy: How America Went Postal is a documentary that examines the phenomenon of spree killing, particularly in a workplace, that became known in the United States as “going postal”. The film argues that the phenomenon originated in the United States Postal Service as a result of hostile work environment following the Postal Reorganization Act of 1971 and then spread to the rest of society.

A demeaning game-show appearance, an ill-advised mushroom-picking outing that goes horribly off the rails, inquiries from a cynical reporter — things just keep getting worse for the middle-aged politician at the centre of Estonian director Toomas Hussar's satire about a shallow, fame-obsessed post-Cold War culture. (TIFF)

Maigret plunges into the murky Parisian underworld. A series of vicious, murderous attacks on three wealthy farms in Picardy hit the national headlines and the elite Brigade Criminelle at the Quay Des Orfevres is called upon to lend its expertise in tracking down the brutal gang responsible for the slaughter. However, Inspector Maigret is resolute in investigating the murder of an obscure anonymous Parisian, an investigation that ultimately solves both crimes.

Two barge skippers fall in love with the same woman.

The story of president Andrew Jackson from his early years, through his meeting with and subsequent marriage to Rachel Donelson Robards. The plot concentrates on the later scandal concerning the legality of their marriage and how they overcame the difficulties.

A prominent politician is preparing to expose a financial scandal. But then a woman who has invested heavily in the shady venture threatens to uncover a damaging secret in the politician's past if he exposes the speculation as a fraud. His problem is compounded by his wife's intolerance of the slightest character flaws.

Fletcher Munson is a lethargic, passive worker for a Scientology-like self-help corporation called Eventualism...

Six friends receive a mysterious chain letter via text messaging and in their email accounts from a maniac who's hunting down teenagers who fail to forward his online chain letter. Who knew they should take the threats in the chain letter seriously? Or that chain letters using the teens' favorite technologies to track them can kill? This maniacal game pits friend against friend as they race to beat rules that seem impossible to escape. Break the chain, lose a life. Do you pass it on? Does friendship mean anything?

Pierre is seventeen and in the middle of puberty. He plays in a band, has sex at parties and secretly tries on women’s clothing and lipstick in front of a mirror. Ever since his father’s death, his mother Aracy has looked after him and his younger sister Jacqueline, spoiling them both. But when he discovers that she stole him from a hospital when he was a new born baby, Pierre’s life changes dramatically. In her new film, director Anna Muylaert explores the mother-child relationship through the eyes of a rebellious son whose whole world unravels overnight.

This colourful, music-filled and sensual melodrama based on early stories by Maxim Gorky tells the fatal love story between the beautiful and rebellious girl Rada and the handsome horse thief Zobar. The story is set in early 20th century Bessarabia, now part of Moldova, then belonging to the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Charlie Sheen, Lloyd Bridges, Cary Elwes, Valeria Golino and Jon Cryer co-star in director Jim Abrahams' (Airplane, Naked Gun) truly hilarious spoof of Top Gun. Recruited to join a top-secret mission for the Air Force, a renegade pilot (Sheen) finds himself coping with an incompetent admiral (Bridges) and a carefully selected squadron of flyers who are either inept or half-blind.

One day, Nobita finds a stray dog drowning in a river while playing by the river side. Feeling sorry for the dog, he decides to take it home by hiding it in a "kennel on the wall" and names it Ichi (originated from "One", which sounds similar to "wan", the sound a dog makes according to the Japanese language), and secretly feeds it and plays with Ichi with his Kendama to find. Soon after, he also adopts a stray cat named Zubu (or wet in Japanese, due to the discovery of it in a rainstorm)... and many other stray cats and dogs. With so many stray cats and dogs, Nobita, along with his friends, decide to send them back in time, 300 million years ago, where there was no other living beings around. After using the Ray of Evolution to allow them to operate a food-making machine, they depart, with a promise to return to the present.

An undercover police officer named Rock Keats befriends a drug dealer and car thief named Archie Moses in a bid to catch the villainous drug lord Frank Coltan. But the only problem is that Keats is a cop, his real name is Jack Carter, and he is working undercover with the LAPD to bust Moses and Colton at a sting operation the LAPD has set up.

Details the catastrophic effects globalization has wrought on the ship, truck and train industries. We visit displaced farmers and villagers in Holland and Belgium, underpaid truck drivers in Los Angeles, seafarers aboard mega-ships shuttling between Asia and Europe, and factory workers in China, whose low wages are the fragile key to the whole puzzle. At a moment when collective bargaining rights are under attack in the United States, and China continues to bow to foreign pressures to prevent such rights from being granted at all, this film asks: Is capitalism the Trojan horse that turns on its inventors?