Film Reviews

The Murderers Are Among Us was the first German film after the Second World War. Filmed in the Soviet occupied section of Berlin in the summer of 1946. The film would be the first film about the wreckage from the war and the first film produced by DEFA.

Set to the intoxicating rhythms of Brazil, "Woman on Top" is a spicy, sexy comedy about the magic of food, love and music. Meet Isabella, a sultry enchantress born with the special gift of melting the palates and hearts of men everywhere. When she decides to break free from her rocky marriage and the stifling kitchen of her husband's restaurant in Brazil, she spirits off to San Francisco in pursuit of her dreams of a real culinary career.

Joseph McKelheer and Cory Knauf (The Hamiltons, The Violent Kind) star in this intense thriller set in the lingering light of the Alaskan midnight sun. Charlie Shepard, a modern day faith healer with a small flock of believers, is stunned when his family is brutally murdered. Six months later a young, mysterious girl (Courtney Halverson) appears and becomes the link to his family's killing and the murderers themselves, ultimately leading to violent consequences for all.

King Lines follows Chris Sharma on his search for the planet's greatest climbs. From South American fantasy boulders to the sweeping limestone walls of Europe, Sharma finds and climbs the hardest, most spectacular routes. Off the coast of Mallorca he discovers his most outrageous project yet, a 70 foot arch rising from the Mediterranean Sea...

Gilles' wife, Elise, who smiles when she thinks of him, cooks and scrubs and cheerfully makes love to him, suspects during her third pregnancy that he is having an affair with her coquettish younger sister, Victorine. Elise suffers, usually in silence. She listens to her husband rave; she asks her priest; she breaks picture frames; she weeps. She decides on a strategy to keep him. Will she succeed?

A man's life is altered unexpectedly after telling a lie to get out of work.

Set in a Tex-Mex border town, Not Forgotten is a classic psychological thriller about Jack and Amaya Bishop, a couple who must come to terms with their tortured pasts in order to save their kidnapped daughter. It is a tale taut with intrigue and steeped in Latino mysticism, where the line between what's real and what's imagined becomes hopelessly blurred.

Invisible Stripes is a 1939 Warner Bros. crime film about a gangster (George Raft) unable to go straight after returning home from prison. The movie was directed by Lloyd Bacon and also features William Holden and Humphrey Bogart. The screenplay by Warren Duff was based on the novel of the same name by Warden Lewis E. Lawes, a fervent crusader for prison reform, as adapted by Jonathan Finn.

The new science teacher Dr. Julian Olcott with a mysterious past arrives in an institutional boarding school for troublemaker girls. Along the night, the intern Mary Smith, who is blackmailing another teacher - Sir Alfred Whiteman - with some love letters, is slaughtered by a werewolf. The detective in charge of the investigation attributes the crime to a wolf, while her mate Priscilla believes she was killed by Sir Alfred. On the next days, other deaths happen in the school, reducing the list of suspects.

Suki is a young woman confronting her destructive mental illness using "The Siamese Burn," an experimental machine designed to eliminate multiple personalities. The closer Suki comes to being "cured," she's haunted by a thought... what if the last unwanted identity turns out to be her?

A young Danish man, Christoffer, lives a life of joy and happiness with his wife Maria in Stockholm. When his father dies his mother insists that Christoffer take over management of the family industry which is in danger of bankruptcy. He is torn between his chosen life and his sense of duty to his family and its past. When he chooses to step in as manager his family life and self-respect languish.

The time is the late '80s, a crucial period in the history of South Africa. President P.W. Botha is hanging on to power by a thread as the African National Congress (ANC) takes up arms against apartheid and the country tumbles toward insurrection. A British mining concern is convinced that their interests would be better served in a stable South Africa and they quietly dispatch Michael Young, their head of public affairs, to open an unofficial dialogue between the bitter rivals. Assembling a reluctant yet brilliant team to pave the way to reconciliation by confronting obstacles that initially seem insurmountable, Young places his trust in ANC leader Thabo Mbeki and Afrikaner philosophy professor Willie Esterhuyse. It is their empathy that will ultimately serve as the catalyst for change by proving more powerful than the terrorist bombs that threaten to disrupt the peaceful dialogue.

Adapted from Edgar Allan Poe's Fall of the House of Usher, director Jean Epstein studiously avoids cheap shocks in this tale of hereditary madness, choosing instead a tightly controlled, spookily subtle technique. The hero, having indirectly caused the death of his beloved, stubbornly tries to resurrect her spirit by devoting himself to painting and sculpture. Epstein conveys the twilight zone between life and death with lingering dissolves and brilliant utilization of slow motion.

In this film director Yoji Yamada bows down before his teacher and role model. Yamada was assistant director on Yazujirō Ozu’s Tōkyō monogatari, a moving family portrait set after the Second World War. In his remake, Yamada has made very few departures from Ozu’s masterpiece in order to update the story of ageing couple Shukichi and Tomiko to present day Japan. Once again, the pair decides to leave their quiet lives in the country to pay a visit to their children and grandchildren in Tokyo. Once there, they discover that neither their oldest son, a doctor named Koichi, nor their eldest daughter Shigeko - who runs a beauty parlour - has time for them: both are too busy attending to their everyday concerns. Even the youngest son went his own way. The old couple feel lonely and bewildered in the fast-paced metropolis.

There is an ancient ritual known to humankind for more than a hundred years...According to the legend, an ominous entity known as The Queen of Spades can be summoned by drawing a door and staircase on a mirror in the darkness, and by saying her name three times. The Queen of Spades gets her energy from reflective objects; she cuts locks of hair from those asleep, and those that see her go mad or die. Four teenagers decide to call The Queen of Spades as a joke. But when one of them dies of a sudden heart attack, the group realizes they are up against something inexplicable and deadly dangerous.