Film Reviews

A quirky girl tries to figure out what to do now that she had graduated from high school, and forms a friendship with an eccentric 40-year-old record collector after playing a prank on him with her best friend.

8 shorts centered around 8 themes directed by 8 famous film directors involved and sharing their opinion on progress, on the set-backs and the challenges our planet faces today.

A junior executive is ordered to boost output in the hometown brewery where his old friends work.

Michael lives in a housing project. He and his friends make music together. Michael is clearly the biggest talent in the group, and one day he is discovered by the established rapper Apollo who makes Michael his ghostwriter. A big opportunity for Michael, this also means moving forward without his friends and breaking the unwritten rule of loyalty. Michael focuses on his music, hoping that the situation will resolve itself. As his friends lose their patience, a dramatic showdown is inevitable.

A couple checks into a suite in Las Vegas. In flashbacks we see that he's a computer whiz on the verge of becoming a dot.com millionaire, she's a lap dancer at a club. He's depressed, withdrawing from work, missing meetings with investors. He wants a connection, so he offers her $10,000 to spend three nights with him in Vegas, and she accepts with conditions. Is mutual attraction stirring?

Charlie Rankin, recently released from prison, seeks vengeance for his jail-house mentor William "The Buddha" Pettigrew. Along the way, he meets the ethereal, yet streetwise, Florence Jane. They embark on a unlikely road trip, careening towards an unlikely redemption and uncertain resolution.

A psychedelic re-telling of the biblical story. Salome is the daughter of the second wife of King Herod. The King is infatuated with her and after she fails to seduce the prophet John (The Baptist) she dances for the King in order to ask for his execution. The story is told in a bizarre way of fast cuts, repetitive dialogue and extreme satire.

Filmed at the Ace Theatre in downtown Los Angeles, Emmy award winning comedian Wanda Sykes ponders her life, the world, and what went wrong.

Heaven is for Real recounts the true story of a small-town father who must find the courage and conviction to share his son's extraordinary, life-changing experience with the world. Four-year-old Colton shares the details of his amazing journey with childlike innocence and speaks matter-of-factly about things that happened before his birth... things he couldn't possibly know.

Mastr'Antonio Miciaccio caretaker and shoemaker is devoted to Saint John Beheaded and is trying to find out who has been stealing the oil that keeps the candle to the saint burning. He also does not approve of his daughter's boy friend and he does not want him to marry her.

The son of Emperor Franz Josef of Austria, Crown Prince Rudolf, is believed to have shot his female lover and himself in a tragic suicide pact in 1882 in Mayerling. Due to Imperial cover-ups, the full story may never be known. This story has been filmed several times, in French in 1935 and in English in 1968. Hungarian director Miklos Jancso recreates those events for his own purposes, continuing his favored theme of the rejection of paternal authority. In the film, which has very little dialog, Rudolf is a good-natured pan-sexual golden boy, who cavorts on his rural estate with a host of beautiful, aristocratic lovers and friends of both sexes. He refuses to leave his country idyll even though he has been ordered to by the Emperor, his father. Despite the fact that for a large part of the film, attractive young people go about unclothed and engaging in erotic encounters, the mood is one of melancholy rather than prurience.

An OVA which centers around Toki and his relationship with his brother Raoh, leading up to Toki's imprisonment in Cassandra and eventually his duel with Raoh. The OVA introduces another new character named Sara, a female doctor who watches over Toki and becomes his love interest.

Jerry Garcia, legendary lead guitarist for the Grateful Dead and David Grisman, virtuoso mandolinist and founder of "Dawg" music… Now, for the first time ever, the musical matrimony and extraordinary friendship of Garcia and Grisman is traced in the award-winning documentary Grateful Dawg.

The classic story of English POWs in Burma forced to build a bridge to aid the war effort of their Japanese captors. British and American intelligence officers conspire to blow up the structure, but Col. Nicholson , the commander who supervised the bridge's construction, has acquired a sense of pride in his creation and tries to foil their plans.

Four 1950s cultural icons (Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, Joe DiMaggio, and Senator Joseph MacCarthy) who conceivably could have met but probably didn't, fictionally do so in this modern fable of post-WWII America. Visually intriguing, the film has a fluid progression of flash-backs and flash-forwards centering on the fictional Einstein's current observations, childhood memories, and apprehensions for the future.