Film Reviews

h)ac(k)tivist-noun: a person who uses technology to bring about social change. The Hacker Wars - a film about the targeting of (h)ac(k)tivists, activists and journalists by the US government.There is a war going on- the war for our minds, The Hacker Wars.

After falling victim to a humiliating prank by the high school Queen Bee, best friends and world-class geeks, Mindy and Jodi, decide to get their revenge by uniting the outcasts of the school against her and her circle of friends.

In the year 1590, the mighty warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi is close to fulfilling his ambition of unifying all of Japan under his banner when he comes across unexpected resistance in the form of a floating fortress known as Oshi Castle. Narita Nagachika, a frivolous hedonistic fellow and unlikely candidate for the position of rebel general, finds himself in charge of defending the castle. His odds? An army of 500 men to combat Toyotomi Hideyoshi's army of 20,000.

From the youth directed novel of the same name by Greogor Tressnow comes a film by Detlev Buck that is a realistic portrait of life in the section of Berlin called Neukölln. It’s about power and weakness, delinquents and victims, and the difficulties a 15-year-old faces in a poor and criminal environment.

Following the shooting of a film on the life of Jesus called This Is My Blood, Marie Palesi (Juliette Binoche), the actress who plays Mary Magdalene takes refuge in Jerusalem in search of the truth behind the myth. The director of the film, Tony Childress (Matthew Modine), who also plays Jesus, can think of only one thing: self-promotion. In New York, television journalist Ted Younger (Forest Whitaker) presents a programme about the life of Jesus.

A nurse recovering in a hospital from a nervous breakdown keeps having dreams where she sees two men trying to murder a third. When she meets the the officer in charge of psychology at the hospital, she is astounded to discover that he is the man in her dream who is the intended murder victim.

A struggling architect, being sued for divorce by his wife and struggling with booze and gambling, finds work remodeling a friend's strip club, the Paradise. There he meets a transsexual stripper who is bothered by accurate, but extremely violent visions of future events. The increasingly violent visions start including the architect, who doesn't believe in the prophesy. One who does however is a psychiatrist who is seeing both the stripper and the architect and is sleeping with the ex-wife. He uses the prophecies for his own financial gain. Finally the scenes from the vision move into reality amidst many plot turns.

An intimate story set during the 1860s in which a young Irish woman Sarah and her family find themselves on both sides of the turbulent wars between British and Maori during the British colonization of New Zealand.