Film Reviews

A wealthy film producer Michael Pace discovers a beautiful unconscious woman pushed ashore by what appears to be a friendly dolphin. Confused and captivated by the apparent supernatural events taking place around him, Michael decides to make a film about his experience with the mysterious woman from the sea. Very soon the movie that Michael is making entwines itself into his family's past, his children's lives, and the very future of their existence together. Set at the cross roads of the modern world and ancient mystical cults, "Bad Girl Island" spins a tale of murder, obsession and seduction that leads its audience into a labyrinth of intrigue, action and mysterious forces.

Ray Milland plays a barrister whose daughter is killed in a "hit-and-run" accident. When his neighbor is also killed, evidence points to the barrister as the murderer. Did he do it? Is he insane?

Sylvester Stallone stars as hard-luck big-rig trucker Lincoln Hawk and takes us under the glaring Las Vegas lights for all the boisterous action of the World Armwrestling Championship. Relying on wits and willpower, Hawk tries to rebuild his life by capturing the first-place prize money, and the love of the son he abandoned years earlier into the keeping of his rich, ruthless father-in-law.

Greta's dad Tom is moving the family cross-country in a dented station wagon, promising a California paradise to his kids. All that's missing is Mom.

In 1950s Connecticut, a housewife faces a marital crisis and mounting racial tensions in the outside world.

In the early days of Nazi Germany, a powerful noble family must adjust to life under the new dictatorship regime. The transition from democracy to dictatorship is thus dramatized through the lives of the family which also owns a powerful German industrial firm. Through such characters as a German Baron, a child molester, a Nazi Storm Trooper, an innocent man framed for murder, and a Captain in the German SS, "Damned" thus shows how so called "German Upper Class Nobility" first resented Adolf Hitler, then accepted him, and at last embraced him.

The comedy film sees TV Burp star Hill embark on a road trip to Blackpool with his Nan (Julie Walters) when he discovers that his hamster only has one week to live.

Hana, a nineteen-year-old college student, falls in love with a man only for him to reveal his secret; he is a Wolf Man. Eventually the couple bear two children together; a son and daughter they name Ame and Yuki who both inherit the ability to transform into wolves from their father. When the man Hana fell in love with suddenly dies, she makes the decision to move to a rural town isolated from society to continue raising the children in protection.

A priest & his family move into a new house, without knowing that it was built over the place where twenty witches were burnt at the stake. Soon the terror begins, with the house terrorizing its inhabitants with the elements that lie within the construction, like a possessed radio and a flying cleaver.

Based on the successful book series by R.L. Stine, this spooky tale finds 11-year-old Max making a deal with the ghosts who haunt his home. If Max helps them find what was responsible for their parents' disappearance, they'll help him transform from a social nobody to the most popular kid in school.

Most classical sci-fi from K. Zeman. Four young boys visit a dinosaur exhibit at the New York city Museum of Natural History. They then row out onto Central Park Lake where they find a secret cave and paddle into, and go back-in-time into a wondrous prehistoric world filled with the very dinosaurs they had just seen.

U.S. Marshal Sam Gerard is accompanying a plane load of convicts from Chicago to New York. The plane crashes spectacularly, and Mark Sheridan escapes. But when Diplomatic Security Agent John Royce is assigned to help Gerard recapture Sheridan, it becomes clear that Sheridan is more than just another murderer.

Told in seven chapters, Käutner’s first postwar film portrays the lives of average people overwhelmed and traumatized by the impact of fascism. Käutner uses the framing device of an automobile whose various owners serve as the film’s protagonists and initiate its episodic structure. The characters represent an interesting cross-section of the German people including a deserting soldier, a Jewish couple and a composer who has been labeled as subversive. During a time when most Germans wanted to forget the past, Käutner eschewed the controlled setting of the UFA studios and chose to film in the bombed out streets of Berlin, crafting a humanistic rendering of recent history.

An independent tragicomedy, Run If You Can is the debut feature for director Brüggemann who, along with his sister, also wrote the compelling screenplay. Forced to spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair, Ben is deeply desperate, despite his humor and vivaciousness. When he meets Christian, his new assistant, Ben treats him like every other helper he’s had. Things suddenly change when Christian meets Annika, “the cello player” whom Ben has been observing from his window for years. The three become close friends, putting Annika in the middle of an emotional, and somehow dangerous, ménage à trois. While conquering Annika is nothing very serious for career-focused Christian, Ben’s love for Annika reminds him of his past and forces him to face his most remote fears. A character-driven story, Run If You Can owes much of its power to the actors’ performances, especially Robert Gwisdek’s outstanding interpretation of Ben.

Average Texas teen, Billie Jean Davy, is caught up in an odd fight for justice. She is usually followed and harrased around by local boys, who, one day, decide to trash her brother's scooter for fun. The boys' father refuses to pay them back the price of the scooter. The fight for "fair is fair" takes the teens around the state and produces an unlikely hero.