Film Reviews

A successful businessman attempting to resurrect his life buys and boards a dilapidated sailboat.

In 1953, a sensitive French boy finds out from a neighbor that his family's Jewish. François Grimbert becomes a physician, and gradually peels the layers of his buried family history which resulted in his difficult upbringing, raised as Catholic by his "Aryan" appearing parents. His athletic father labored to stamp out stereotypical Jewish characteristics he perceived in his son, to keep the family's many secrets, as most relatives fought in World War II, and later were hauled off to labor and death camps by the Gestapo.

Mary, a poor farm girl, meets Tim just as word comes that war has been declared. Tim enlists in the army and goes to the battlefields of Europe, where he is wounded and loses the use of his legs. Home again, Tim is visited by Mary, and they are powerfully attracted to each other; but his physical handicap prevents him from declaring his love for her. Deeper complications set in when Martin, Tim's former sergeant and a bully, takes a shine to Mary.

José Ferrer won the Oscar for Best Actor for his portayal of the swordsman-poet using his silver tongue to woo the woman he loves for another man. Cyrano de Bergerac is a play written in 1897 by Edmond Rostand. Although there was a real Cyrano de Bergerac, the play is a fictionalization of his life that follows the broad outlines of it. The entire play is written in verse, in rhyming couplets of twelve syllables per line, very close to the Alexandrine format, but the verses sometimes lack a caesura. It is also meticulously researched, down to the names of the members of the Académie française and the dames précieuses glimpsed before the performance in the first scene. The play has been translated and performed many times, and is responsible for introducing the word "panache" into the English language.

The year is 1968. To a small town in the south of Israel, mostly inhabited by Moroccan immigrants, a few families from India arrive, searching for a better life in the west. The instinct driven Moroccans patronize the "black" Indians, while the quiet Indians see the Moroccans as Ignorant and coarse. In this cultural war two girls, Moroccan and Indian, discover the sexual revolution of the 60's.

A Paris real estate developer who feels compelled to withdraw from his seemingly perfect life into a world of his own. Is the man going insane? By conventional standards, maybe, but it's clear that the life he's fleeing is madder still from his point of view, and since that point of view is unfailingly witty and astute, we even come to accept his delusions as more "real" than reality.

A gang of pirates rape the two sole survivors of a ship wreck. The violated girls are rescued by the strange inhabitants of a supposedly haunted island, where they are granted supernatural powers to strike revenge against the pirates.

Three 'Bukowskian' torrid nights in the life of a man in search of love. Harry Voss, 12, is young and naive. Love, for him, is romantic love between princes and princesses demurely kissing each other on the mouth. His father is a hero who kidnapped his mother and married her on a lonely mountain peak... Later on, he'll do the same. But Harry has a lot to learn. He learns about 'being hot' and 'fucking' and about what you have to do when you're alone and 'feel the itch'. He also learns that there are handsome men and ugly ones, that love can be unfair. That one can find comfort in drinking... but above all he learns that man is capable of anything - absolutely anything! - to get his fair share of love.

Adventures of Ivan the Fool and humpbacked horse in the world of kind magical creatures and cruel people.

Thunder, an abandoned young cat seeking shelter from a storm, stumbles into the strangest house imaginable, owned by an old magician and inhabited by a dazzling array of automatons and gizmos. Not everyone welcomes the new addition to the troupe as Jack Rabbit and Maggie Mouse plot to evict Thunder. The situation gets worse when the magician lands in hospital and his scheming nephew sees his chance to cash in by selling the mansion. Our young hero is determined to earn his place and so he enlists the help of some wacky magician's assistants to protect his magical new home.

Sallah Shabati, the patriarch of the big family recently arrived to Israel from Yemen, tries to make money and get better housing, in a country that can barely provide for its own and is in the midst of absorbing hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from Arab countries.

Angela Chiaromonte (Lillian Gish) is the daughter of a wealthy Italian prince who is killed in a fall from his horse. Though Angela stands to inherit half of a large estate, her older half-sister burns the will and thus inherits everything herself, throwing Angela into poverty. Fortunately, Angela is engaged to marry dashing Captain Giovanni Severi (Ronald Colman) - but he soon is captured by Arabs while on an expedition to Africa. Believing him dead, Angela, dedicating her life to his memory, becomes a nun, unaware that her lover has escaped his captors and is returning to Italy! The dramatic climax takes place against a backdrop of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.

A sleazy but affable guard dog trainer is blackmailed to steal a manuscript for a tell-all book from one of his clients.

Deux jeunes mariés vont devoir survivre dans un Paris post-apocalyptique infesté de zombies. L'amour triomphera t-il de la mort ?

ARRANGED centers on the friendship between an Orthodox Jewish woman and a Muslim woman who meet as first-year teachers at a public school in Brooklyn. Over the course of the year they learn they share much in common - not least of which is that they are both going through the process of arranged marriages.