Film Reviews

In 1913, laconic sea captain Corto Maltese, adrift in the Pacific, gets rescued by his bandit friend Rasputin who's taking two rich shipwrecked teens to an island where his boss the Monk will hold them for ransom. WWI complicates things.

A (Based On True Events) movie about prisoners escaping during the heyday of Korean nationalism and international image-consciousness, the Seoul World Olympics of 1988.

Inkubus tells the story of a skeleton crew working the final shift at a soon to be demolished police station. The night takes a gruesome turn when the demon, Inkubus, calmly walks into the station holding the severed head of a murdered girl. Inkubus toys with the crew, allowing himself to be restrained, and begins to proudly confess to his litany of crimes, some dating back to the Middle Ages. Why? Inkubus has a score to settle with the one detective that almost put him away some thirteen years ago. To their dismay, the cops quickly become pawns in Inkubus' brutal crowning achievement of murder, gore, and mayhem. They ultimately realize it's his world, they only die in it. Written by Anonymous (www.imdb.com)

History books traditionally depict the pre-Columbus Americas as a pristine wilderness where small native villages lived in harmony with nature. But scientific evidence tells a very different story: When Columbus stepped ashore in 1492, millions of people were already living there. America wasn’t exactly a New World, but a very old one whose inhabitants had built a vast infrastructure of cities, orchards, canals and causeways.

Arising out of the horror of the Spanish Civil War, a candidate for canonization is investigated by a journalist who discovers his own estranged father had a deep, dark and devastating connection to the saint's life.While researching the life of Josemaria Escriva, the controversial founder of Opus Dei, the young journalist Robert uncovers hidden stories of his estranged father Manolo, and is taken on a journey through the dark, terrible secrets of his family’s past.

Political intrigue and psychological drama run parallel. The queen is in seclusion, veiling her face for the ten years since her husband's assassination, longing to join him in death. Stanislas, a poet whose pen name is Azrael, is a suicidal anarchist, his imagination haunted into hate by longing for this queen who's drawn apart. He enters her private quarters intent on killing her then himself, but they fall in love, in part because he looks like the king. Stanislas wants her to regain political power by appearing to the public, and she tries to convince him to find hope and escape. All the while, the queen's enemies plot to keep the lovers together but to thwart their plans.

Four friends (two couples) play a game of truth on the evening after one of them, Ernesto, is mistakenly told by a doctor he has only three months to live. Ernesto's a sad sack, living with Lea at his parents', about to lose a job he got through his best friend, Alberto. Ernesto is also hopelessly in love with Alberto's fiancée, Susana - who, for her part, has gotten Lea a job as the sign-language interpreter on a local TV news show Susana anchors, a job Lea is about to lose. The truths that come out during the game, especially Ernesto's desire for Susana, create havoc. Alberto and Susana's wedding and Ernesto's new test results are coming soon.

Troubled Roula finds herself drawn to Leon, an author of children's books who has suffered an enormous emotional and creative blockage ever since his wife died in a motorcycle accident two years before. Leon has only his 12-year-old daughter Tanja to keep him company. As romance blooms between Leon and Roula, his daughter approves. Unfortunately, Roula is carrying heavy emotional baggage stemming from the incest she suffered at the hands of her father.

Robert Drew shows various faces during John F. Kennedy's funeral.

Wishing to find peace, Zatoichi travels to his old village but only finds trouble when he ends up in a love triangle and finds old scores have followed him home.

Advice columnist, Dan Burns is an expert on relationships, but somehow struggles to succeed as a brother, a son and a single parent to three precocious daughters. Things get even more complicated when Dan finds out that the woman he falls in love with is actually his brother's new girlfriend.

Goodbye, Dragon Inn is set in the approximately ninety minutes of the last feature at an old Taipei cinema that is closing down, showing King Hu's 1967 sword-fighting classic Dragon Inn. Only a few people are present in the cinema, and a variety of subplots are developed around them. Throughout the film, the ticket woman tries to find the projectionist, searching for him in order to present him with a steamed bun. A young Japanese tourist wanders around the cinema in search of a homosexual encounter. An older man tells him that the cinema is haunted. An old man, who was one of the actors who appeared in the original Dragon Inn, watches the film with tears in his eyes. Outside the theater, he encounters an older man who had been watching the film with his grandson; this man also starred in the original film. The film is shot with almost no camera movement, most shots lasting well over thirty seconds. There are only about a dozen of lines of dialogue.

Delia, a young Romanian girl, comes to Bucharest with her parents to collect a prize she has won in a contest organized by a soft-drinks company. The prize is a beautiful new car. All Delia has to do now is appear in front of the camera in a commercial. All goes well until it becomes clear that Delia and her parents have very different ideas about what to do with the new car. Meanwhile, the contest's sponsor needs a radiant prize-winner with a gleaming smile. A wicked satire and a psychological portrait of a society perverted by its slavery to capitalism and consumerism

Love Me follows Western men and Ukrainian women as they embark on an unpredictable and riveting journey in search of love through the modern "mail-order bride" industry.

Jackie Chan plays the part of the class clown in a shaolin temple whose deadliest secret is stolen. All is lost until Jackie's character discovers dancing blue ghosts with bright red hair who haunt the library.