Film Reviews

A relatively boring Los Angeles couple discover a bizarre, if not murderous way to get funding for opening a restaurant.

Makoto and Yura Onoda are happy newlyweds but neither of them has sexual experience before. Desperately willing to improve their sex life, they look for help from their relatives, friends and "the media". While their sexual knowledge is increasing, embarrassing moments are not uncommon for the innocent couple.

Forget the pie charts, color-coded maps and hyperventilating pundits. What's the street-level experience of voters in today's America? In a triumph of documentary storytelling, ELECTION DAY combines eleven stories--all shot simultaneously on November 2, 2004, from dawn until long past midnight--into one. Factory workers, ex-felons, harried moms, Native American activists and diligent poll watchers, from South Dakota to Florida, take the process of democracy into their own hands. The result: an entertaining, inspiring and sometimes unsettling tapestry of citizens determined on one fateful day to make their votes count.

An exploration of technologically developing nations and the effect the transition to Western-style modernization has had on them.

Locked away in the Jewish ghetto of an occupied Ukrainian town in 1941, a mother revisits her life in a last letter to her son.

A struggling painter is possessed by satanic forces after he and his young family move into their dream home in rural Texas, in this creepy haunted-house tale.

What About Dick? begins with the birth of a sex toy invented in Shagistan in 1898 by Deepak Rushdie Obi Ben Kingsley (Eddie Izzard), and tells the story of the subsequent decline of the British Empire as seen through the eyes of a Piano. The Piano (Eric Idle) narrates the tale of Dick (Russell Brand); his two cousins: Emma, (Jane Leeves) an emotionally retarded English girl; her kleptomaniac sister Helena (Sophie Winkleman) and their dipsomaniac Aunt Maggie (Tracey Ullman) who all live together in a large, rambling, Edwardian novel. When the Reverend Whoopsie (Tim Curry) discovers a piano on a beach, a plot is set afoot that can be solved only by a private Dick, the incomprehensible Scottish sleuth Inspector McGuffin (Billy Connolly) who with the aid of Sergeant Ken Russell (Jim Piddock) finally reveals the identity of the Houndsditch Mutilator.

Two Korean ex-pats in Paris are recruited by a French mobster. The duo find themselves at war with their mobster recruiters and each other.

Anti-Semitism, race relations, coming of age, and fathers and sons: in Baltimore from fall, 1954, to fall, 1955.

Inspector Juve finds out that Fantômas is serving a prison sentence in Belgium. Desperately eager to get the master criminal to France, Inspecteur Juve comes up with a plot to allow Fantômas to escape.

A playboy pretends to be a paid escort in order to court--and test the moral character of--a young British socialite. Comedy.

Schizophrenic writing dominates "Lucky Night," a 1939 film starring Robert Taylor and Myrna Loy. Loy is Cora, an heiress who gives it all up for the excitement of looking for a job and living on her own; she meets up with unemployed and flat broke Dick (Taylor). The two of them embark on a wild night of gambling and winning, where everything they touch turns to gold. Pretty soon they're in love and, to the horror of Loy's father, tie the knot.

After struggling to find employment, Amanda takes a hotel position in a small town where she ends up fighting for her life.

Teacher Rob Dekoster is a good man, albeit a bit too frivolous and liberal with funds the local arts center's interim director. His wife Nelle, who sometimes abuses drugs, spoils his ingrate teenage stepdaughter Sandy, who is kind only to her sweet, mentally handicapped brother, Jimmy Vandevyver. After a class on sexual abuse from feminist teacher Lydia De Beule, Sandy pretends Rob abused her. Lydia, Rob's ex, eagerly helps her fabricate 'proof', which a female police commissioner eagerly believes. A frustrated judge (and father) shamelessly ignores the legal benefit of the doubt, even tricks Rob while in jail. Nelle discovers more then one sick truth.

Julia moves in with her fiancé, David, but his ex-wife and her own haunting past join forces to rock her quiet suburban existence.