Film Reviews

A mysterious man with missing memories asks some very personal questions of a beautiful woman he just met.

A look at man's relationship with Dirt. Dirt has given us food, shelter, fuel, medicine, ceramics, flowers, cosmetics and color --everything needed for our survival. For most of the last ten thousand years we humans understood our intimate bond with dirt and the rest of nature. We took care of the soils that took care of us. But, over time, we lost that connection. We turned dirt into something "dirty." In doing so, we transform the skin of the earth into a hellish and dangerous landscape for all life on earth. A millennial shift in consciousness about the environment offers a beacon of hope - and practical solutions.

The Parking Lot Movie is a documentary about a singular parking lot in Charlottesville, Virginia. The film follows a select group of parking lot attendants and their strange rite of passage.

Eddie lands his first teaching gig at an inner city middle school and finds his highly pubescent pupils are receiving no form of sexual education. Eddie isn't really equipped to teach them...he's not exactly experienced romantically.

Strong-man Eugene Sandow flexes his muscles and strikes a few poses in front of a black background. This was a short film shot by William K.L. Dickson and produced in Thomas Edison's Black Maria studio.

'Chance' is a black comedy about how hard it is to find "the one". Mostly told from the point-of-view of a young, sexually aggressive woman, named Chance, whom according to her: "we're all out there looking for true love", which turns out to be a very elusive thing indeed, and Chance is no exception. She's desperately on the prowl for a man, but since she's more mouse than cat, she gets herself into scrape after scrape in her screwball pursuit of love. Surrounded by a bevy of adoring but completely wrong-for-her men (and one dead girl from Manchester, England), Chance has to pick her way through her messy life in order to figure out which guy is "it".

Madge Winton (Marion Davies), a beautiful secretary, makes herself look homely in order to avoid advances by lecherous bosses. When her new employer, writer Freddy Matthews (Robert Montgomery), accidentally sees her without her disguise, she has to pretend to be her roommate Sadie.

Despite being engaged to a successful Iranian plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills, Shirin finds herself falling for a mysterious young man who lives in a lighthouse in northern California.

The first part in a new series of films produced by Musée d'Orsay, 'Flight of the Red Balloon' tells the story of a French family as seen through the eyes of a Chinese student. The film was shot in August and September 2006 on location in Paris. This is Hou Hsiao-Hsien's first Western film. It is based on the classic French short The Red Balloon directed by Albert Lamorisse.

An idealist young dancer named Zoe (Romina D’Ugo) tackles the difficult issue of resurrecting disco dancing in today’s music business. She meets hostility beyond resistance on every dance floor where she spins and twirls. Fortunately, she has at least one ally, a nightclub owner and visionary named Michael (David Guintoli) who shares her zeal for the long-ago dance craze. With money to burn, Michael arranges for Zoe to test market bringing back disco, even with rival choreographers like Malika (Brooklyn Sudano). Soon dance takes a two-step in the wrong direction when hard-hearted Malika and Michael start vying to become Zoe’s dance partner.

From her childhood bedroom in the Chicago suburbs, an American teenage girl uses social media to run the revolution in Syria. Armed with Facebook, Twitter, Skype and cameraphones, she helps her social network in Damascus and Homs braves snipers and shelling in the streets and the world the human rights atrocities of one of the most brutal dictators. But as the revolution rages on, everyone in the network must decide what is the most effective way to fight a dictator: social media or AK-47s.

A 12-year-old cartographer secretly leaves his family's ranch in Montana where he lives with his cowboy father and scientist mother and travels across the country on board a freight train to receive an award at the Smithsonian Institute.

The London police is having trouble with organized crime commited by juvenile delinquents. Their leader is an American who is an expert at turning young men into ruthless gangsters. American cop John Harris is asked to help the London police to break up the organization.

In a suburb of Strasbourg, Alsace, France, ten year old boy, Max, spends his summer vacation with his grandmother. He hears Manouche gypsy Romani music being played in a local bar, and loves it. He goes to visit the gypsies in search of a guitar, where he meets a young Romani tomboy, 'Swing'. She introduces Max to her gypsy community who live in caravans and down-at-heel public housing. Over several days, Max is taken into the community to witness Romani lifestyle, traditions, knowledge of plants, and particularly their Manouche music. Max is particularly fascinated by Miraldo, the Romani guitarist he first heard in the bar, and asks to take guitar lessons with him (Miraldo is played by one of the greatest guitarists of gypsy jazz, Tchavolo Schmitt).

In 1983 the upstart United States Football League (USFL) had the audacity to challenge the almighty NFL. The new league did the unthinkable by playing in the spring and plucked three straight Heisman Trophy winners away from the NFL. The 12-team USFL played before crowds that averaged 25,000, and started off with respectable TV ratings. But with success came expansion and new owners, including a certain high profile and impatient real estate baron whose vision was at odds with the league’s founders. Soon, the USFL was reduced to waging a desperate anti-trust lawsuit against the NFL, which yielded an ironic verdict that effectively forced the league out of business. Now, almost a quarter of a century later, Academy Award-nominated and Peabody Award-winning director Mike Tollin, himself once a chronicler of the league, will showcase the remarkable influence of those three years on football history and attempt to answer the question, “Who Killed the USFL?”