Film Reviews

Noémie and Priscilla, two teenage girls from working class backgrounds, cultivate the same violence, the same contempt of the world. They are a source of serious concern for family and friends, who sense them capable of going to extremes. Noémie has already tried to kill herself once when with the work of German Romanic writer Kleist ringing true to her, convinces equally unhappy best friend Priscilla to make a suicide pact. The two of them can see no reason to go on living but the practicalities and opportunity to go through with that plan is harder than they envisage.

Twenty years after the American people have been told the oil has run out and disease has scared them into complacency, the United States has become a fascist state. One man, former race car driver Franklyn Hart, now a puppet spokesman for public transportation, rebuilds his race car and sets off to California from Boston where people have returned to living life like they were twenty years prior.

In The White Angel, Raffaello Matarazzo’s sequel to his blockbuster Nobody’s Children, the perpetually put-upon Guido and Luisa return for a new round of trials and tribulations.

Dr. Vasi invents a super-powered robot, Chitti, in his own image. The scientific body, AIRD, that must approve the robot, declines it based on its not having emotions and the ability to make rational judgment. A sudden flash of lightning evokes emotions in the robot, and Chitti is seemingly ready for integration into the human world. Then, Chitti falls in love with Dr. Vasi's fiancée Sana and turns on his creator.

The main character is a miller, who sometimes acts strangely but is otherwise a goodhearted hardworking honest man. He sometimes keeps the villagers up all night by howling. Finally the villagers decide that the miller has to be committed into a mental hospital, where the hero does not have to spend too much time until he escapes. The miller takes to the woods near his home but there he is constantly harassed by the chief of the police with his posse.

A divorced writer from the Midwest returns to her hometown to reconnect with an old flame, who's now married with a family.

"Niagra, Niagra" begins quietly in a drugstore in Poughkeepsie, where Marcie, the film's disarming heroine, likes to shoplift. She literally crashes into Seth, a quiet outsider, also on a shoplifting spree. Marcie invites Seth to accompany her to Canada to find a black hairstyling head. They set off in Seth's beat-up station wagon, destined for a toy store in Toronto. While on the road, Marcie confides to Seth that she has Tourette's syndrome, necessitating a series of detours to liquor stories and pharmacies along the roads of upstate New York.

Tsuneo is a university student working part-time in a mah-jong parlour. Lately the customers have been talking about an old lady who pushes a baby carriage through the streets. They say she is carrying something for a crime syndicate, and they wonder what it is she has in the carriage... Money? Drugs? One day, the owner of the mah-jong parlour sends Tsuneo out to walk his dog. A baby carriage comes rolling down a hill and crashes into a guard rail. The old lady asks him to look into the carriage, where he finds a young woman clutching a knife. This is how Tsuneo first meets the girl who calls herself Josée.

Director Louis Feuillade won fame and critical acclaim with his early crime serials, Fantômas (1913-14) and Les Vampires (1915). These episodic films were hugely popular, but they also brought Feuillade a fair amount of criticism from the bourgeois establishment, who accused him of glorifying crime and making heroes of criminals. Feuillade’s well-meaning response to this brow-beating was another serial, the 12-part epic entitled Judex. The Plot: When his family is ruined by the unscrupulous banker Favraux, Jacques de Tremeuse resolves to bring him to justice. Adopting a disguise and the name Judex, he captures the crooked banker and takes him to his secret lair. Learning of Favraux’s dishonest ways, his daughter Jacqueline gives away his wealth when she learns of his death. This infuriates a pair of ruthless crooks, Diana Monti and Moralés, who immediately swear to take revenge on Jacqueline, and her protector, Judex.

After he's shot during a heist in East L.A., an armored truck driver wrestles with rehabilitation and tracking down the man who committed the crime.

Condé-sur-Ginette, en périphérie d'une grande ville, à mille lieux du sable chaud, des cocotiers et du bleu océan des Caraïbes. C'est l'été. Le soleil brûle le chrome des mobylettes, réchauffe le bitume des tours, asphyxie les halls d'immeubles et crame les esprits. Ici, tout le monde rêve des plages de Santo Rico. Certains plus que d'autres. Pour Tony Merguez et José Frelate, les deux MC's du qua

Tad is a celebrity archeologist and adventurer just like his hero Max Mordon... in his dreams! In reality, Tad is a Chicago construction worker. One day, however, he is mistaken for a real Professor and takes his place on a flight to Peru in search of the Lost City of Paititi. Professor Lavrof and his beautiful daughter Sara are waiting for the famous professor to crack the code. Unfortunately for Tad, Sara is engaged to real-life hero Max Mordon, but Max has secretly betrayed the Professor by teaming up with the evil Kopponen and his shady Odysseus corporation. Time for Tad to step up...

A masseur whose son is a student in Germany learns that he has become a member of the Neo-Nazi party.

An 18 year old girl called Joy has gone missing. Another girl called Helen is a few weeks away from leaving her care home. Helen is asked to 'play' Joy in a police reconstruction that will retrace Joy's last known movements. Joy had everything. A loving family, a boyfriend, a bright future. Helen, parent-less, has lived in institutions all her life and has never been close to anyone. Gradually Helen begins to immerse herself into the role, visiting the people and places that Joy knew; quietly and carefully insinuating her way into the lost girl's life. But is Helen trying to find out what happened to Joy that day, or is she searching for her own identity?

The story is set "slightly in the future" and revolves around Aya "Aachan" Okamura, a woman who has been working for two years and has begun living on her own for a job opportunity. With Aachan's mother working overseas as a doctor, Aachan's father is now living alone with the family's longtime pet cat Mii-san. One night, Aachan returns from a long day at work, and as she rests on her bed, she reminiscences about the times the family had together. She remembers the sadness she felt when her mom went overseas, and the solace she felt when her father brought home Mii-san to give her comfort. Then, she receives a phone call…