Film Reviews

A Nurse named Yuko (Ai Kago) has a strange experience while taking care of a girl named Fukie. Test results show a cyst inside Fukie’s body, but that cyst is actually the leftover grudge from a baby who was unable to be born. The cyst’s grudge spreads to Fukie and everyone around her. Soon Fukie’s father goes mad and commits murder. Fukie’s sister Mariko has special spiritual power, and together with their mother they have some success driving out the evil spirit. But the worst of the grudge is yet to come.

What does it mean to be a successful comedian? How far can the boundaries of taste be pushed to get a laugh? Four top comics, Ricky Gervais, Louis C.K., Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock, discuss and debate their craft.

Portabella’s first feature, co-scripted by poet Joan Brossa, became one of the most influential works of the Barcelona avant-garde, although like all his early films, it circulated only in an underground fashion. Eschewing dialogue, the director constructs a non-narrative story in fragments that reveal the daily lives of an adulterous couple interspersed with a cryptic stream of unrelated imagery. The title of this homage to directors including Eisenstein, Antonioni, Bergman, and Buñuel refers to the 29 “black years” of the Franco dictatorship. — chicago.cervantes.es

The story concerns Dr James Xavier, ably portrayed by Ray Milland. He has invented a serum for improving human vision. When his funding is cut he proceeds to experiment on himself -- with horrifying results. From the director who gave you Swamp Women, The Wasp Woman, and The Beast with a Million Eyes!

After committing a murder, a man locks himself in his apartment and recollects the events the led him to the killing.

The friends Ikko, Amalia, Babb, Murmel and Ling are playing in the marching band "Gamle Tomter". The norwegian marching band competition is closing in and while somebody is hoping to get a new girlfriend others are hoping to get renowned for their great musical talent. However, there is one big "thing", or better said a certain person that is standing in their way: Their chief conductor, the famous cornet player Elsebeth Bull.

Singer and songwriter Hank Williams rises to fame in the 1940s, but alcohol abuse and infidelity take a toll on his career and marriage to fellow musician Audrey Mae Williams.

Between Alice, a hospital nurse and Aldo, a shampoo sales representative, things have turned sour of late. Alice blames her husband for lacking ambition and contemplates divorce.One day Aldo wins the ten million euro lotto prize. But, unwilling to share the bonanza, he keeps mum about it, all the more as he finds out Alice has an affair with Gérard, Aldo's former friend and ... new boss. However, Aldo, leading a double life, starts spending his money ...

Silentium is a 2004 Austrian film based on a novel by Wolf Haas.

On a stormy Saturday afternoon, six students from Crestview Academy begin to meet horrible fates as they serve out their detentions. Is a fellow student to blame, or perhaps Crestview's alleged ghosts are behind the terrible acts?

This cross-media documentary (film, installation and website) explores the life and writings of Daniel Paul Schreber. Now famous as an Outsider Artist, Schreber was a successful lawyer, who in 1893, started to receive messages from God via a ‘Writing Down Machine’ that spanned the cosmos. He spent the next nine years confined to an asylum. This is his story.

In the horror of 1944 Auschwitz, a prisoner forced to burn the corpses of his own people finds moral survival trying to save from the flames the body of a boy he takes for his son.

A crusading politician falls prey to the temptations of power.

Itinerant Kurdish teachers, carrying blackboards on their backs, look for students in the hills and villages of Iran, near the Iraqi border during the Iran-Iraq war. Said falls in with a group of old men looking for their bombed-out village; he offers to guide them, and takes as his wife Halaleh, the clan's lone woman, a widow with a young son. Reeboir attaches himself to a dozen pre-teen boys weighed down by contraband they carry across the border; they're mules, always on the move. Said and Reeboir try to teach as their potential students keep walking. Danger is close; armed soldiers patrol the skies, the roads, and the border. Is there a role for a teacher? Is there hope?

Progeria is an extremely rare and fatal disease, exemplified by accelerated aging in the children who are afflicted by it. There is no treatment. There is no cure. Enter Doctors Leslie Gordon and Scott Berns. When their son, Sam, was diagnosed with progeria at age two, the prognosis was grim—the couple were simply told to enjoy the few years they had left with their only son—but they weren’t willing to give up that easily. They spearheaded a campaign to save Sam and the other children in the world who share this devastating illness. In a little more than a decade, their extraordinary advances have led not only to identifying the gene that causes progeria and testing the first experimental drug to treat it but also to the amazing discovery that it is linked to the aging process in all of us.