Film Reviews

Visions, memories, and mysticism all help a 40-something woman to find the strength to leave her cheating husband.

A twin takes her deceased sister's place as wife of the man they both love.

Oscar Wilde watches an outrageous staging of his banned play "Salome" at a London brothel, with parts played by prostitutes, Wilde's host, his lover Bosey, and Lady Alice.

Kagerô-za is a 1981 independent Japanese film directed by Seijun Suzuki and based on a novel by Kyōka Izumi. It forms the middle section of Suzuki's Taishō Roman Trilogy, preceded by Zigeunerweisen (1980) and followed by Yumeji (1991), surrealistic psychological dramas and ghost stories linked by style, themes and the Taishō period (1912–1926) setting.

Fearing her husband could become a killer, a woman seeks a psychiatrist's help.

Belka, the amazing flying dog is unexpectedly hurdled into the streets of Moscow when the rocket she is in malfunctions during one of her circus routines. Fortunately the crash leads her to meet a streetwise dog named Strelka and her irredeemable rat friend Venya. Together with other amusing friends found along the way, the three find themselves in a space program-training center where they get sent away in a rocket, leaving planet Earth...

This documentary of the Rolling Stones' 1969 US tour has become a legendary, harrowing symbol of the tragic demise of the "Peace and Love" era. After a successful tour across the US, the Rolling Stones gave a free December concert at Altamont Speedway in California with the Grateful Dead, Ike and Tina Turner, Jefferson Airplane, and the Flying Burrito Brothers. The band unwisely selected the Hells Angels to provide security, and the bikers resorted to violence to keep the stoned, restless, and often naked crowd in line. The result: dozens of injuries and the on-screen stabbing of a young black man (during "Sympathy for the Devil") by one of the concert's staff security. In a manipulative but effective move, the Maysles brothers filmed Mick Jagger in the editing room witnessing the on-camera murder for the first time. The film also works as a rock-and-roll document, capturing the band at their most relaxed, intoxicating, and electrifying.

A small-town Sheriff discovers there is something wrong with the sleepy town of Golden Torch, and he quickly realizes he may not get out alive.

Helen and Luella are just another typical God-fearing mother and daughter who happen to bake Mincemeat muffins and run a charming if not a bit faded Bed and Breakfast Inn. Or are they? On the eve of the biggest gay party weekend of the year, and having not made advance reservations, five 'couples' find themselves having to make accommodations far from the city. There's Dom and Alex, the 'performers' and Deborah and Gabby, the sophisticated, entrepreneurial 'lipsticks'. There's also Mike and Eric, the upscale 'yuppie' power couple and their annoying 'fag-hag' friend, Lizette. Also checking in are Starr and Brenda, the struggling folk singer and tough-talking tomboy and lastly Rodney and Todd, the sugar daddy and 'personal trainer'. What should have been the biggest gay party weekend of the year quickly turns into every gay and lesbian's worst nightmare!

John Keitel wrote the film based on his personal undergraduate experience and filmed campus footage in the neighborhood and environs surrounding his graduate film school alma mater USC.

The study of a youth on the edge of adulthood and his aunt, ten years older. Fabrizio is passionate, idealistic, influenced by Cesare, a teacher and Marxist, engaged to the lovely but bourgeois Clelia, and stung by the drowning of his mercurial friend Agostino, a possible suicide. Gina is herself a bundle of nervous energy, alternately sweet, seductive, poetic, distracted, and unhinged. They begin a love affair after Agostino's funeral, then Gina confuses Fabrizio by sleeping with a stranger. Their visits to Cesare and then to Puck, one of Gina's older friends, a landowner losing his land, dramatize contrasting images of Italy's future. Their own futures are bleak.

At the end of the war, Odysseus, the wandering hero, with his companions begins his sail back home to the Mediterranean. The conclusion of his adventure is delayed by many natural obstacles and he takes an internal journey of fleeting memories of his childhood, his parents, love for a beautiful girl, nostalgia for the past, regret for what he did, and the deep silence that envelops everything. He confronts the most terrible loneliness following a shipwreck in which all the comrades perish.

A battle ensues among two government spy teams in an underground facility after their boss is assassinated.

In 1965, passionate musician Glenn Holland takes a day job as a high school music teacher, convinced it's just a small obstacle on the road to his true calling: writing a historic opus. As the decades roll by with the composition unwritten but generations of students inspired through his teaching, Holland must redefine his life's purpose.

In Santa Cruz for the summer, a young woman discovers the sport of surfing -- and a family secret as well.