Film Reviews

America's king of clean comedy delivers wickedly funny jokes in his fifth hour-long special.

Something or someone is attacking people one by one on the beach. Some of them are mutilated, but most of them are sucked into the sand, disappearing without a trace. What is the creature responsible? Where does it live, and where did it come from? And is there any chance of it reproducing? Meanwhile, David Huffman and Mariana Hill are once-almost-married old friends, reunited over the death of her mother on the beach, and searching for clues in the abandoned buildings where they used to play when they were young.

A Hong Kong-set mystery centered on a detective who has been framed for a series of gruesome murders.

Jack Terry is a master sound recordist who works on grade-B horror movies. Late one evening, he is recording sounds for use in his movies when he hears something unexpected through his sound equipment and records it. Curiosity gets the better of him when the media become involved, and he begins to unravel the pieces of a nefarious conspiracy. As he struggles to survive against his shadowy enemies and expose the truth, he does not know whom he can trust.

Kinane's first one-hour comedy special "Whiskey Icarus," during which the gruff-voiced funny man dishes on unsliced pizza, stereotypes, chivalry, single white dudes at the movie theater, suburbia and some weirdo who brought a bag of pancakes onto a plane

Quatermass is the director of an important scientific base, where he builds nuclear rockets for the colonization of the Moon. A strange fall of meteorites in a nearby village leads to the discovery of a huge base under a strict military control, officially a factory of artificial food. Quatermass reveals that the factory is actually breeding alien creatures.

In 1939, Sakura Nishi is a young army nurse who is sent to the field hospitals in China during the Sino-Japanese war. She has to assist the surgeon Dr. Okabe with an incredible number of amputations. In the crowded wards, she gives sympathy to some of the soldiers, including sexually servicing one who has lost both arms and has no hope of returning home. She falls in love with Dr. Okabe, and follows him to the front, even though he is impotent from his morphine addiction

The film starts out incredibly in a beautiful Gothic castle in Germany. As little girls, Kitty Wildenbrück and her sister Evelyn have been fighting when their grandfather tells them the story behind an incredibly uncanny painting: Legend has it that a fiendish Red Lady is to return to the castle every hundred years and kill seven people. Fourteen years later, Kitty (Barbara Bouchet) has become a successful fashion photographer. Suddenly, people begin to get murdered...

In the War's closing days, when a conscience-driven Japanese soldier fails to get his countrymen to surrender to overwhelming force, he adopts the lifestyle of a Buddhist monk.

A troubled young man is drawn to a mythical place called Midian where a variety of monsters are hiding from humanity.

A naive drifter runs away from his army father in hopes of making it on the car racing circuit. In Las Vegas, he meets a young scam artist, who develops a crush on him. He is then introduced to a whole gang led by a young hustler. The racer-to-be then gets a lesson in the wild side, getting involved in one situation after another. Patsy Kensit makes a cameo as another hustler and Daryl Hannah appears as the scam artist's surrogate mom.

Werner Krauss, who had played the deranged Dr. Caligari six years earlier, stars as a scientist who is tormented by an irrational fear of knives and the irresistible compulsion to murder his wife. Driven to the brink of madness by fantastic nightmares (designed by Ernö Metzner and photographed by Guido Seeber in a brilliant mix of expressionism and surrealism), he encounters a psychoanalyst who offers to treat the perplexing malady.

Veteran buttoned-down LAPD detective Roger Murtaugh is partnered with unhinged cop Martin Riggs, who -- distraught after his wife's death -- has a death wish and takes unnecessary risks with criminals at every turn. The odd couple embark on their first homicide investigation as partners, involving a young woman known to Murtaugh with ties to a drug and prostitution ring.

In 1858 France, Bernadette, an adolescent peasant girl, has a vision of "a beautiful lady" in the city dump. She never claims it to be anything other than this, but the townspeople all assume it to be the virgin Mary. The pompous government officials think she is nuts, and do their best to suppress the girl and her followers, and the church wants nothing to do with the whole matter. But as Bernadette attracts wider and wider attention, the phenomenon overtakes everyone in the the town, and transforms their lives.

In 1994, a South African photojournalist received the Pulitzer Prize for his picture of a starving girl stalked by a vulture. Weeks later, he carried out a terrible, desperate act--an act that embodied the anguish of an entire nation.