Film Reviews

Realistic story of working class Yorkshire life. Two schoolgirls have a sexual fling with a married man. Serious and light-hearted by turns. Rita, Sue And Bob Too was adapted by Andrea Dunbar from two of her own controversial plays. Rita (Siobhan Finneran) and Sue (Michelle Holmes) are two teenagers living on a run-down council estate in Bradford who both share a job babysitting for Bob (George Costigan) and Michelle's (Lesley Sharp) children. Whilst giving them a lift home one night, Bob decides to take Rita and Sue up to a deserted, country-side landscape. Clearly knowing what he has in mind, Rita and Sue are only too happy to oblige and both have a sexual encounter with him that becomes a regular occurrence. Despite the blatant politically-incorrect nature of the film, this does emerge as a somewhat controversial, though enduringly amusing film that has a sharp, gritty undertone.

After having narrowly escaped an attempt on his life at the hands of a psychopath, detective inspector Takakura quits active service in the police force and takes up a position as a university lecturer in criminal psychology. But his desire to get to the bottom of criminals’ motives remains, and he does not hesitate long when former colleague Nogami asks him to reopen an old case.

A sheltered Amish child is the sole witness of a brutal murder in a restroom at a Philadelphia train station, and he must be protected. The assignment falls to a taciturn detective who goes undercover in a Pennsylvania Dutch community. On the farm, he slowly assimilates despite his urban grit and forges a romantic bond with the child's beautiful mother.

A division of marines survive a battle with the Chinese army but find themselves stranded without contact on the wrong side of the front.

A woman trapped in a boring marriage begins an affair with a handsome man who seems able to read her mind. She doesn't know that he has broken into her house and read her diaries, where she has recorded her deepest thoughts and fantasies.

A polyptych of interconnected stories in different time-zones, shifting between a Yunnan village, a campus, and the Gobi Desert.

Roger Cobb is a author who has just separated from his wife. He moves into a new house and tries to work on a novel based on his experiences in the Vietnam War. Strange things start happening around him; little things at first, but as they become more frequent, Cobb becomes aware that the house resents his presence.

The story of identicial twin brothers -- one loyal to Nazi Germany and the other a loyal American who get involved with Nazi agents.

Written in 1625 by the British playwright Ben Jonson, the play “The Staple of News” provides a historic root for this discussion about the role of the press in modern day Brazil. Journalists of several generations discuss the dilemmas of the selection and focus of their subjects, the resistance of the media in accepting itself as a political agent (though it has had a crucial role in influencing and forming the public opinion), the inevitability of interpretation as there are no hard facts in nature, and (above all) the search for an always complex balance between credibility and the public’s growing demand for news, which brings some organs to approach the realm of entertainment.

A California congressman's wife and daughter are abducted and held hostage in a historic hotel and Logan McQueen (Reynolds) is rushed to the scene to assist his former partner, Charlie Duffy (Durning), who has been taken captive trying to broker the ransom deal. McQueen must risk his life to face the cunning killer (Carradine) and save the hostages and his long-time friend.

Advertising executive Nick Marshall is as cocky as they come, but what happens to a chauvinistic guy when he can suddenly hear what women are thinking? Nick gets passed over for a promotion, but after an accident enables him to hear women's thoughts, he puts his newfound talent to work against Darcy, his new boss, who seems to be infatuated with him.

J.R. is a typical Italian-American on the streets of New York. When he gets involved with a local girl, he decides to get married and settle down, but when he learns that she was once raped, he cannot handle it. More explicitly linked with Catholic guilt that Scorsese's later work, we see what happens to J.R. when his religious guilt catches up with him.

After four years apart, Ahmad returns to his wife Marie in Paris in order to progress their divorce. During his brief stay, he cannot help noticing the strained relationship between Marie and her daughter Lucie. As he attempts to improve matters between mother and daughter Ahmad unwittingly lifts the lid on a long buried secret...

Thomas, a father in his fifties, returns by chance to the town where he grew up. He collapses and wakes up forty years earlier in the body of his teenage self. Thrown back into his past, Thomas will not only have to re-live his first love, but also try to understand the reasons for his father’s mysterious departure. Can you change the past by living it again?

Emerging from the Chinese film renaissance of the 1990s (Raise the Red Lantern, Farewell My Concubine) this haunting folk tale set in rural China in the 1920s tells the story of a young woman forces to grieve the death of a man she was destined to marry. Combining astonishing visuals with intriguing plot turns, this moving drama is not to be missed. When the spirited Young Mistress (Wang Lan) is kidnapped on the way to her arranged wedding, the groom is killed in an explosion in an attempt to rescue her. The peasant charged with her care, Kui (Chang Shih) manages to free her but the groom's bitter mother forces the Young Mistress to honor her agreement by marrying a wooden statue of her son, and staying chaste. Director Jianxin Huang's fascinating exploration of forbidden love and rigid social hierarchy reveals a culture in turmoil, where tradition is taken to cruel extremes and young lovers may not survive.