Film Reviews

Unable to support his family in the Australian outback, a man turns to stealing horses in order to make money. He gets more deeply drawn into the outlaw life, and eventually becomes involved in murders. Based on the life of famed 19th-century Australian outlaw Ned Kelly.

As a war rages on in the province of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea, a young girl becomes transfixed by the Charles Dickens novel Great Expectations, which is being read at school by the only white man in the village. In 1991, a war over a copper mine in the South Pacific tore the island of Bougainville apart. The reclusive “Popeye” (Hugh Laurie) offers the children in fourteen-year-old Matilda’s tiny village an escape with Charles Dickens' Great Expectations. But on an island at war, fiction can have dangerous consequences.

An heiress takes a job as a department store clerk.

A police inspector, suspecting an attorney of two child sex murders, has him held for a questioning session that goes on for hours.

The first two days of a marriage. Ivan, a punctilious clerk brings his virginal bride to Rome for a honeymoon, an audience with the Pope, and to present her to his uncle. They arrive early in the morning, and he has time for a nap. She sneaks off to find the offices of a romance magazine she reads religiously: she wants to meet "The White Sheik," the hero of a soap-opera photo strip. Star-struck, she ends up 20 miles from Rome, alone on a boat with the sheik. A distraught Ivan covers for her, claiming she's ill. That night, each wanders the streets, she tempted by suicide, he by prostitutes. The next day, at 11, is their papal audience. Can things still right themselves?

When Dorine Douglas' job as proofreader for Constant Consumer magazine is turned into an at-home position during a downsizing, she doesn't know how to cope. But after accidentally killing one of her co-workers, she discovers that murder can quench the loneliness of her home life, as a macabre office place forms in her basement, populated by dead co-workers.

Hovering between the realms of poetry and history, this stunningly photographed, elegiac work – shot mostly in long takes – mixes cryptic metaphor and fantastic symbolism to tell the story of Avetik, an Armenian filmmaker exiled in Berlin. In sensuous, lyric styling, Askarian employs dreamlike images to reflect the history of his homeland, tranquil childhood memories, images inspired by erotic medieval poetry, and autobiographical shades of his own exile in Germany.

Penny Morris and Tommy Williams are both starstruck young teens but nobody seems to give them any chance to perform. Instead they decide to put up their own show to collect money for a summer camp for the kids.

Sadie looks up to her older sister Georgia, a successful folk singer who's happily married with children, but can't break out of the bar-band circuit and hit the big time she desperately covets. It's in part due to her attraction to drugs and booze, and also to her own unwise choice in men. Finally, though, Sadie's Achilles heel is a rough, unlovely voice very different than her sister's crowd-pleasing singing.

A ruthlessly ambitious Scottish lord siezes the throne with the help of his scheming wife and a trio of witches.

Emanuelle goes undercover into a prison to expose the corrupted officials who are brutalizing the inmates. Emanuelle is shocked by the horrors and humiliation the prisoners are subjected to, but when her true identity is discovered, she finds herself at the receiving end.

Axel Heyst is an American recluse with a dubious past living in the Dutch East Indies port of Surabaya circa 1913. Staying in a German hotel there, Heyst becomes entranced with a member of the hotel's all-female orchestra.

Two strangers who both happen to be in marketing, share a room at a bed-and-breakfast when a snowstorm strands their flight in Montana on Christmas Eve.

Driven by an intense need for fame and validation, members of a dysfunctional Hollywood dynasty have lives as dramatic as any movie.

STILL BILL is an intimate portrait of soul legend Bill Withers, best known for his classics “Ain’t No Sunshine,” “Lean On Me,” “Lovely Day,” “Grandma’s Hands,” and “Just the Two of Us.” With his soulful delivery and warm, heartfelt sincerity, Withers has written the songs that have – and always will – resonate deeply within the fabric of our times. Filmmakers Damani Baker and Alex Vlack follow Withers and offer a unique and rare look inside the world of this fascinating man. Through concert footage, journeys to his birthplace, interviews with music legends, his family and closest friends, STILL BILL presents the story of an artist who has written some of the most beloved songs in our time and who truly understands the heart and soul of a man.