Film Reviews

Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the beach, it appears that our large fishy friends have found a way to chomp on you when you're chilling out on the sand too!

It would be hard to name anyone who has had more of an impact in the realm of animal research and wildlife conservation than Jane Goodall, whose 45 year study of wild chimpanzees in Africa is legendary. In Jane's Journey, we travel with her across several continents, from her childhood home in England, to the Gombe National Park in Tanzania where she began her groundbreaking research and where she still returns every year to enjoy the company of the chimpanzees that made her famous. Featuring a wide range of interviews and spectacular footage from her own private collection, Jane's Journey is an inspiring portrait of the private person behind the world-famous icon.

Lapland Odyssey is a comedy about Janne, a man from Lapland in northern Finland, a man who has made a career out of living on welfare. Inari, his girlfriend, is tired of Janne's incapability of getting a grip on life, Janne wasn't even able to buy a digital TV box that Inari had given money for. Inari gives an ultimatum: a digital box needs to arrive by dawn or she leaves. Janne sets out into the night with his two friends to find a box. On their way to the city of Rovaniemi, Janne and his friends face many challenges, obstacles and temptations. They learn that they need to be daring. There's no room to give into bitterness. The most important thing isn't success, but rather the journey in itself.

After retrieving the Crystal Skull in Utah, Flynn Carsen receives a map in the mail with the secret location of King Solomon's Mines. When the scroll is stolen, Judson explains the power of the Key of Solomon's book and assigns Flynn to retrieve the map. The map is useless without the legend piece to decipher it, which is located in Volubilis near the Roman ruins in Morocco. Flynn heads to Casablanca to the ruins where he is chased by a group of mercenaries leaded by General Samir. They too want to find the location of King Solomon's mines. Flynn teams-up with Professor Emily Davenport working in the dig and they escape from General Samir and his men. While traveling to Gedi, they save the local Jomo from death and the trio faces a dangerous journey through the wild Africa.

Victor Sluzhkin signs on as a teacher of geography in a secondary school in his native Perm (in the Urals) and gets lost in a haze of hard vodka, desperate love for a nymphet-like student and the stress of educating teenagers. Geographer, as the students immediately dub Sluzhkin, attempts to escape from the grueling, dull, stultifying reality of Russia's provincial life in a rafting tour to the Urals. Accompanied by wild, adventure-seeking adolescents, faced with the numerous grim surprises of the nature, Geographer is poised to find himself and his own truth.

An interview session with Arnold Schwarzenegger and director James Cameron gives us a better understanding of how hard it was making Terminator, The (1984) on such a low budget. Clips from the film are present along with funny and interesting stories from behind the scenes.

Film taken from a boat heading down the Hudson is shown at varying speeds, often giving a sense of rapid transit.

One winter, a pastor finds an abandoned infant on his church steps, and builds 'a drop box' to rescue any future foundlings.

Someone is stealing cheerleaders and other pretty girls and selling them to the highest bidder. Female super sexy spy Ginger is soon employed to investigate the disappearances. She does so by going undercover with a fellow agent and doing whatever is necessary to put an end to the operation and take down the leaders.

Kick the Moon is about two high school students from a small-city high-school. One is a fighter who is involved in a legendary street-fight with a rival school, the other is a geeky wimp who loves to study and is one of the only students to not participate in the fight. Years later, the punk has grown to be a teacher in the high-school he attended and the nerd has become a mafia underboss and has returned to his hometown to set up operations. The movie revolves around the two men's rivalry for the affections of a local lady restaurant owner and the fighting of rival gang factions in the small city.

The story of Pascal Ichak, a larger-than-life French traveller, bon vivant, and chef, who falls in love with Georgia and a Georgian princess in the early 1920s. All is well until the arrival of the Red Army of the Caucasus, as the Soviet revolution that has swept Russian comes to Georgia. Told as a flashback from the present, as a French-Georgian man whose mother was Pascal's lover translates his memoirs for Pascal's niece.

Phil Gaines is a bitter, cynical cop who investigates the case of a dead stripper/porno actress found on the beach. Gaines is experiencing a troubled relationship with a hooker, and things don't get any better when the dead girl's father launches his own investigation.

Jake Remy leads a gang of outlaw cutthroats making their escape toward Mexico from a successful robbery. Barring their way is a river--crossable only by means of a ferry barge. The barge operator, Travis, refuses to be bullied into providing transport for the gang and escapes across river with most of the local populace--leaving Remy and his gang behind, desperately seeking a way across. A river-wide stand-off begins between the gang and the townspeople, both groups of which have left people on the wrong side of the river.

The pages that whisper through this brooding, beautiful tone poem are from nineteenth-century Russian literature, primarily Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. An anonymous man wanders through decomposing, fog-enshrouded catacombs and encounters a series of “the degraded and the humiliated,” including a holy prostitute and a Kafkaesque bureaucrat. Shot partly in Sokurov’s dreamlike black and white with a dense sound track of eerie, echoing voices and bursts of mournful Mahler.

Olive is reading ghost stories to the boys. Popeye scoffs; Bluto decides to take advantage of this by staging various pranks (a headless man, an animated skeleton, and a sheet-over-balloon ghost). He pins the blame on Popeye and then goes to comfort Olive. Popeye retaliates by turning invisible, thanks to a jar of vanishing cream.