Film Reviews

Food, glorious food! Some of the most sumptuous and involving films revolve around that most common of acts: eating. 18 MEALS is an omnibus film of criss-crossing stories divided into three segments; breakfast, lunch and dinner. Jorge Coira's debut feature, shot over nine days in Santiago de Compostela has enough tasty portions to please audiences. Amongst Coira's expansive ensemble are aging street musician Edu, a pair awaking from a one-night stand, a businessman visiting his closeted homosexual brother and a lonely housewife, Sol. Victor and Sol are two of 18 MEALS' most fascinating characters as they each hide something - his sexuality, her depression - from those around them. Best of all is Pedro Alsono as Vladimir, a local celebrity actor who makes a meal for a mystery woman who never arrives. Who hasn't gone to a lot of trouble to do something extra special for someone just to have it go unappreciated?

In a typical English working-class town, the juveniles have nothing more to do than hang around in gangs. One day, Alan Darcy, a highly motivated man with the same kind of youth experience, starts trying to get the young people off the street and into doing something they can believe in: Boxing. Darcy opens a boxing club, aiming to bring the rival gangs together.

Jim Carrey stars as Tom Popper, a successful businessman who’s clueless when it comes to the really important things in life...until he inherits six “adorable” penguins, each with its own unique personality. Soon Tom’s rambunctious roommates turn his swank New York apartment into a snowy winter wonderland — and the rest of his world upside-down.

Jealousy flares after the headmistress of an elite boarding school for girls becomes obsessed with a new student.

Philip Kwok plays a repentant killer who vows to destroy the masked gang of which he was a member. A young fighter and his martial arts brothers come to the town to catch the killers, but one of them is not to be trusted!

A documentary that examines the relationship between celebrity and society.

After a strange storm in the Carribean causes a boat to sink, a family finds itself stranded on an island in the "27th dimension".

It's not easy being a teenager and Mike, a sixteen-year-old, has it espcially hard. He lives in the sticks with his mother, a non-stop nagger, in Faintville, a Canadian timber industry town. He has no father, no friends, not even a favorite meal. Basically, his sole wish is simply to vanish from the face of the earth. One day, Mike writes his own obituary and shoots himself. To his great disappointment he wakes up the in the local hospital. During a routine examination, the doctors discover a plum-sized tumor in his brain. Mike can scarcely believe his luck and keeps the illness to himself to avoid undergoing surgery that would save him. Staring death directly in the eyes, however, changes Mike's point of view and he re-evaluates his opinion of both enchanting and crazy Miranda. Somebody seems to understand him after all.

What happens when a woman goes in search of her identity and discovers that the cycle of violence she's been working hard to break in the US is part of her family history and culture on another continent?

The ostensible subject of this film is the growing, drying, peeling and packaging of persimmons in the tiny Japanese village of Kaminoyama. The inhabitants explain that it is the perfect combination of earth, wind and rain that makes their village’s persimmons superior to those grown anywhere else, including the village just a few miles away. The film’s larger subject, however, is the disappearance of Japan’s traditional culture, the end of a centuries-old way of life.

Valter brani Sarajevo (English: Walter Defends Sarajevo, German: Walter verteidigt Sarajewo) is a Yugoslav partisan drama film that takes place during World War. Walter Defends Sarajevo takes place in Sarajevo, Bosnia against the German withdrawal from Yugoslavia towards the end of World War II in 1944. The Nazis are desperate to have their tank divisions in Greece diverted to shore up the defence of Germany. In order to get the tank divisions safely back, they need fuel, and Sarajevo is an important refuelling post. Utmost secrecy is required as interference with the fuel supplies in Sarajevo will endanger the whole of the German war effort. There is one problem however: a partisan resistance leader named Walter, who is so shadowy that not even his own people know anything about him, including what he looks like, gets in their way.

This film dramatizes events that occurred as the hostility between India and Pakistan over Kashmir came to a head in 1999, when more than 1,000 men crossed the "Line of Control" that separates the two locations. Taliban and Pakistani soldiers took over the area, blocking the main road that linked the regions. Standing their ground, Indian soldier drove them away, but not without losing more than 400 of their own men first.

Samantha Crawford is living a storybook life: she’s happily married, she lives on a ranch where she keeps her beloved horse, and the stories she’s told and illustrated since childhood have become published books. When her husband Billy is killed in a senseless act of violence, Sam loses her faith and her will to live. But a death-defying encounter with two children leads to a reunion with Joe, her oldest friend. As Sam watches “Papa” Joe care for and love the kids in his under-resourced neighborhood, she begins to realize that no matter life’s circumstances, the love of God is always reaching out to us.

Amiro is a young boy who has lost his home during the war. He spends his days by working odd jobs, until he realizes that the only way that he can realize his dreams is by enrolling in school. In school, he has conflict with other students. Finally there is a competition to see who can say the whole alphabet in one breath.

A jewel thief moves towards a reunion of revenge with his lover, who pushed him out of their speeding getaway car.