Film Reviews

An assassin teams up with a woman to help her find her father and uncover the mysteries of her ancestry.

The year is 1898. A beautiful woman named Marie (also known as Casque d'Or) has fallen in love with a carpenter named Manda. The problem is that Marie is the girlfriend of a hoodlum in the Leca gang. So in order to have the lovely Marie, Manda faces and defies the gang and kills Leca. Soon after however, Manda is sent to the gallows.

Sending a burning arrow into the stunting effects that the compartmentalization of culture has on how creativity manifests, visual artist Doug Aitken embarked on an experiment exploring a less materialistic and more nomadic direction of art creation, exhibition, and participation. Station to Station involved a train that crossed North America housing a constantly changing creative community including artists, musicians, and curators, who collaborated in the creation of recordings, artworks, films, and 10 unique happenings, across the country.

As the Great Day of the Flyers nears, the Great Valley's flying youngsters are eager to participate in the annual exhibition to show off their skills. Everyone, that is, except free-spirited pterodactyl Petrie, whose individualism causes problems when it comes to staying in formation. Enter his dinosaur pals Littlefoot, Cera, Spike and Ducky, who encourage Petrie to embrace his uniqueness.

A young writer brings a collection of short stories to a big Moscow publishing house. The manuscript stays at the office and mysteriously influences the lives of anyone who opens it and reads at least one page. There are four stories in the manuscript, and four readers whose lives are changed after reading them. The situations range from realistic to absurd to thrilling to create a rich portrait of life in contemporary Russia and showcase the thoughts, feelings and ambitions of people who live there.

'We Were Here' is the first film to take a deep and reflective look back at the arrival and impact of AIDS in San Francisco, and how the City's inhabitants dealt with that unprecedented calamity. It explores what was not so easy to discern in the midst of it all - the parallel histories of suffering and loss, and of community coalescence and empowerment.

Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard leaves Europe, eventually arriving in the United States. With the help of Einstein, he persuades the government to build an atomic bomb. The project is given to no-nonsense Gen. Leslie Groves who selects physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer to head the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico, where the bomb is built. As World War II draws to a close, Szilard has second thoughts about atomic weapons, and policy makers debate how and when to use the bomb.

Attempting to sell her home after her marriage ends, Alice (Rachel Blanchard) holds an open house -- but the event spirals into a nightmare when a serial-killing couple (Brian Geraghty and Tricia Helfer) doesn't leave and Alice becomes a prisoner in her own basement crawl space. Now she watches as the disturbing relationship between her captors unravels. Anna Paquin co-stars in this chiller written and directed by her brother, Andrew.

A hyperactive boy and his best friend, a slow-witted youth with an affinity for horses, start collecting scrap metal for a shady dealer.

5 friends have a plan to rob a transporter that can change their lives.

A man, accompanied by a dog, struggles through snow on a mountain side. We see film stock blister; drawn square shapes appear. Then, we see an infant's face. The images of struggling climber, baby, blurred film stock, large snow flakes, and what may be microscopic details of matter are superimposed on each other, one dominating the frame briefly to be replaced by another. As the man falls in the snow and tries to regain his feet, the baby continues to appear, first with eyes closed. Alternately, images rush by - montages of paper cutouts and life under a microscope.

A rebellious teen butts heads with the teachers at an all-girl charm school in Mexico City.

As a privileged teenager living in an affluent suburb of Rio de Janeiro, Jean has little to worry about beyond games, grades and girls. But as his overbearing father drags the family into debt, Jean is forced into a change of lifestyle which opens his eyes to the world beyond his 'casa grande' - not least that of the feisty, mixed-race firecracker Luiza. Cultures, classes and generations collide in this engrossing coming-of-age drama from Brazil.

P-A-X-497/341, aka “Pax” , a curious young man from the well-ordered but loveless future, travels to present day New Orleans in search of romance novelist Elizabeth Barrett – whose book he has come upon during an archeological dig in the year 3127. Hoping Elizabeth can explain the concept of love to him, which is now nonexistent in his time, Pax embarks on an adventure filled with new discoveries. Elizabeth introduces Pax to life in the year 2011, filled with love, music and of course, destiny. When Pax doesn’t return to the future by the given deadline, Bob, his fellow scientist, travels back in time to find him. Meanwhile, as Elizabeth helps Pax learn about love, she ends up confiding in her colleague, played by Valerie Harper, about her own upcoming “surprise” engagement.

Amidst a nuclear war, a plane carrying a group of schoolboys crash lands on a deserted island. With no adult survivors, the boys are forced to fend for themselves. At first they cooperate, but when the they split into two separate camps -- one led by the pragmatic Ralph and the other by militaristic Jack -- their society falls into disarray, leading to a disturbing examination of human nature and a chilling conclusion.