Film Reviews

New York in the 1920s. Max Perkins, literary editor at Scribner’s Sons is the first to sign such subsequent literary greats as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. When a sprawling, chaotic 1,000-page manuscript by an unknown writer named Thomas Wolfe falls into his hands, Perkins is convinced he has discovered a literary genius. Together the two men set out to work on a version for publication and a seemingly endless struggle over every single phrase ensues. During this process, Perkins the gentle family man and Wolfe the eccentric author become close – a relationship eyed with suspicion by their wives. When ‘Look Homeward, Angel’ becomes a resounding success, the writer grows increasingly paranoid.

Professor Paris Catalano visits Venice, to investigate the last known appearance of the famous vampire Nosferatu during the carnival of 1786.

Masaki, a baseball player and gas-station attendant, gets into trouble with the local Yakuza and goes to Okinawa to get a gun to defend himself. There he meets Uehara, a tough gangster, who is in serious debt to the yakuza and planning revenge.

Tawes is the sheriff in a godforsaken little hole somewhere in Tennessee. A man of strong moral fibre he is always quick to judge others and follows the law zealously. Then he meets Alma, a young beautiful girl who turns his world upside down. Unable to ignore his feelings he starts having an affair with her. But in small town nothing is secret for long

Birch, a young man living in the Catskill Mountains, reunites with his childhood friend from the city, Andrew.

In the sequel of "Ants in the Pants" we again meet Flo and his friends.

Trouble in suburbia: psychiatrist's teenage daughter gets arrested for demonstrating on a college campus--holding a sign with a "dirty word" written on.

An acclaimed hijacking documentary that eerily foreshadowed 9/11. We meet the romantic skyjackers who fought their revolutions and won airtime on the passenger planes of the 1960's and 1970's. By the 1990's, such characters were apparently no more, replaced on our TV screens by stories of anonymous bombs in suitcases. Director Johan Grimonprez investigates the politics behind this change, at the same time unwrapping our own complicity in the urge for ultimate disaster.

The rematch of the century.

I'll Get By is an updated remake of the 1940 20th Century-Fox musical Tin Pan Alley. William Lundigan and Dennis Day play William Spencer and Freddie Lee respectively, successful song publishers who make hits out of such numbers as "I Got a Gal in Kalamazoo", "Deep in the Heart of Texas", "You Make Me Feel So Young", "There Will Never Be Another You", and other favorites (the rights to all of these songs were conveniently held by 20th Century-Fox). The partnership has some hard times, especially during the feud between ASCAP and the radio networks, when only public-domain songs like "I Dream of Jeannie" were permitted to be broadcast.

Wim Wenders says, "If in our century something sacred still existed… if there were something like a sacred treasure of the cinema, then for me that would have to be the work of the Japanese director, Yasujiro Ozu. He made fifty-four films. Silent films in the Twenties, black-and-white films in the Thirties and Forties, and finally colour films until his death on December 12th, 1963, on his sixtieth birthday. Ozu's work does not need my praise and such a sacred treasure of the cinema could only reside in the realm of the imagination. And so, my trip to Tokyo was in no way a pilgrimage. I was curious as to whether I still could track down something from this time, whether there was still anything left of this work. Images perhaps, or even people… Or whether so much would have changed in Tokyo in the twenty years since Ozu's death that nothing would be left to find.

The Carpetbaggers is a 1964 American film starring George Peppard as a character based largely on Howard Hughes and Alan Ladd as a former western gunslinger turned actor with the pseudonym Nevada Smith, played the following year in a prequel starring Steve McQueen in the part. Carroll Baker portrayed an actress inspired by Jean Harlow, who appeared in Hughes' film epic Hell's Angels. The Carpetbaggers was directed by Edward Dmytryk, filmed in 70mm, and was Alan Ladd's final film; Ladd died some months before its release.In the movie, George Peppard plays a hard-driven industrialist more than a little reminiscent of Howard Hughes. While he builds airplanes, directs movies and breaks hearts, his friends and lovers try to reach his human side, and find that it's an uphill battle. The film's title is a metaphor for self-promoting tycoons who perform quick financial takeovers, impose dictatorial controls for short-term profits, then move on to greener pastures.

After a long voyage from Scotland, pianist Ada McGrath and her young daughter, Flora, are left with all their belongings, including a piano, on a New Zealand beach. Ada, who has been mute since childhood, has been sold into marriage to a local man named Alisdair Stewart. Making little attempt to warm up to Alisdair, Ada soon becomes intrigued by his Maori-friendly acquaintance, George Baines, leading to tense, life-altering conflicts.

When Juvenal, a presumed miracle worker, appears on the scene Bill Hill attempts to exploit him but his plans go astray with the untimely intervention of August Murray and the developing relationship between Juvenal and Lynn Faulkner.

Based on the Imperium Comics series, Trailer Park of Terror. Six troubled high school students and their chaperon, an optimistic youth ministries Pastor, return from an outdoor character building retreat in the mountains. During a raging storm, their bus crashes, hopelessly stranding them in the middle of the Trucker's Triangle, a forgotten locus of consummate evil in the middle of nowhere.