Film Reviews

When a spoiled English girl living in 19th century India loses both parents in a cholera epidemic, she is sent back to England to live in a country mansion. The lord is a strange old man-- frail and deformed, immensely kind but so melancholy. She wishes to discover what has caused him so much sorrow and to bring joy back to the household. It all must have something to do with the screams and wails which echo through the house at night and no one wants to talk about.

This melodrama investigates the life of a prostitute in a pseudo-documentary style.

A fairy tale of the misadventures of a beautiful but temperamental Neapolitan peasant, Isabella, when she meets the ill- tempered Spanish Prince Rodrigo Ferrante y Davalos. The King of Spain has ordered Rodrigo to choose a wife among seven Italian Princesses, but he is smitten by the lowly peasant.

This Ken Loach docu-drama relates the story of a British woman's fight with Social Services over the care of her children. Maggie has a history of bouncing from one abusive relationship to another. She has four children, of four different fathers, who came to the attention of Social Services when they were injured in a fire. Subsequently, Maggie was found to be an "unfit mother" and her children were removed from her care. She finally meets the man of her dreams, a Paraguayan expatriate, and they start a family together. Unfortunately, Social Services seems unwilling to accept that her life has changed and rends them from their new children. She and Jorge together, and separately, fight Social Services, Immigration, and other government bureaucrats in a desperate battle to make their family whole again.

Lush scenery and gorgeous photography highlight this bio of Princess Kaiulani (Q'Orianka Kilcher), a 19th-century Hawaiian princess raised in England but determined to maintain her people's independence from aggressive American businessmen. After being sent to England as a child by her Scottish father, Kaiulani returns to Hawaii and becomes a political activist who fights to retain her throne, even though she must leave her English paramour.

In the back country of South Africa, black minister Stephen Kumalo (Canada Lee) journeys to the city to search for his missing son, only to find his people living in squalor and his son a criminal. Reverend Misimangu (Sidney Poitier) is a young South African clergyman who helps find his missing son-turned-thief and sister-turned-prostitute in the slums of Johannesburg.

China is in unrest, as the Republic falls prey to Warlords like Kahn Xin, who holds an entire province hostage to the opium trade—and destroys all who oppose him. Only the revered Wudang monks dare stand in Kahn’s way in order to protect the very soul of China. Among them is the Westerner, White Crane, a spiritual master of the martial arts and protector of the innocent. Revenge is not in Crane’s heart—until a mercenary army storms the temple and slaughters the beloved female Grandmaster Myling. Out of the ashes of the temple ruins, Crane rises—with vengeance in his heart. Crane comes upon Jane Marshall, a New York lounge singer and her gangster boss Bingo Quo. But it’s Bingo’s dangerous professional ties to Kahn that draw both Crane and Jane deep into the Warlord’s lair. Now torn between the spiritual Wudang teaching and the cold-blooded life of an assassin, Crane is about the cross the fine line between justice and revenge.

A drama centered on an office worker on the verge of retirement who begins to relive both real and imagined memories.

Emma, a young author, goes to see Erik, the publishing editor whom she's sent her debut novel. Their meeting leads to a love affair. The middle-aged Erik leaves his wife. What Erik doesn't know is that Emma recently began a relationship with the dramatist Stefan, whose play is also being published by Erik's company. One day Stefan overdoses and is brought to the emergency ward where Erik's wife Ann works as a doctor. These incident is the start of the story about how four people's lives are crossed during ten years, until the four of them finally end up in the same loneliness they started.

Matter-transmitter sabotage leaves a British scientist (Bryant Halliday) disfigured and full of amps.

Original footage of the prosperous farming community of Glencoe Minnesota, 60 miles west of Minneapolis, was filmed in 1979 for a PBS documentary. But for the next six years Malle was too busy with other projects to finish this work. He returned in 1985 for a follow-up and found the community reacting to the mid eighties crisis of overproduction in farm country. with weekly foreclosures on family farms, and many families moving to the south, Malle documented a sense of frustration and apprehension from the same participants he had befriended in better times half a decade earlier.

The theme is the founding of the state of Israel. The action begins on a ship filled with Jewish immigrants bound for Israel who are being off loaded on Cyprus. An Intelligence officer succeeds in getting them back on board their ship only to have the harbor blocked by the British with whom they must negotiate. The second part deals with declaring independence and the resulting warring.

Can you solve the mystery of the 13 moons?

Like a warped fun-house mirror, the song-poem industry has run parallel to the mainstream music business for close to a century; it's estimated that over 200,000 song-poems have been recorded since 1900. The genre's durability can be traced to three of our deepest American desires - to be in show business, to get rich quick, and to share and express our deepest feelings. We meet several of the "songwriters" - from an elderly woman to a young African-American man to a small-town Iowan with big-time dreams - each of whom has been in the "business" for awhile, churning out odd compositions that cover the waterfront of American obsessions, from Jesus to genitalia, from politics to Elvis. We also meet the producers (often known as song-sharks) who hold out the tantalizing promise of fame to their eager customers, and the has-been musicians who sit in studios, day after day and year after year...

Pieces of a mysterious artefact known as the Skull Stone are scattered across the planet, and they hold the power to reveal the location of the largest deposit of gold in the world. The Doronbo Gang, the villainous trio of the series, are on pursuit of fame, power and wealth as they search for the Skull Stone. However, their plans are constantly foiled by Yatterman, a heroic, mecha-riding duo of youngsters.