Film Reviews

Marine Boy is the story of a former national swimmer who finds himself in debt, and out of desperation is employed as a mule by a gangster boss, smuggling drugs by sea.

This soulful documentary illuminates the hell-and- back life of the late, great L.A. alto sax legend Frank Morgan. A prodigy who was acclaimed as the natural heir to his bebop mentor, Charlie Parker, Morgan derailed his career with heroin, which led him into a life of crime. After decades in prison, he made an astonishing comeback, leaving behind recordings of deep, melancholy beauty. Framed by a tribute concert held in San Quentin, where Morgan’s 19-year-old Asian-American protégé, Grace Kelly, performs a heart-stopping version of “Over the Rainbow,” N.C. Heikin’s film is filled with revealing interviews with the colleagues, lovers, family and wives who accompanied Morgan on his long and rocky journey to redemption.

When the Campbell family moves to upstate Connecticut, they soon learn that their charming Victorian home has a disturbing history: not only was the house a transformed funeral parlor where inconceivable acts occurred, but the owner's clairvoyant son Jonah served as a demonic messenger, providing a gateway for spiritual entities to crossover.

Jake is a driver for a seedy escort service operating out of 'The Naked Eye strip club', he's a street thug type who falls for a witty high-class escort named Sandy. Except one night Sandy is found murdered, the only clues left behind are cell phone calls made the night she died. To avenge Sandy's death Jake must risk everything and walk a bloody path to find her killer.

It is nearly ten years after Voyager's return from the Delta Quadrant, and the Federation is in a crisis. The Federation's main suppliers of dilithium crystals are disappearing. Space and time have folded around several planets, effectively isolating them from any contact with outside worlds. And this phenomenon is not natural - someone or something is causing this to happen. This necessitates drastic measures; some of which are outside the Federation's normal jurisdiction. For this, Admiral Pavel Chekov, head of Starfleet Intelligence, turns to Commander Tuvok, Voyager's former security officer and current head of the newly reorganized Section 31. Tuvok must put together a new covert, renegade crew - mostly outcasts and rogues - even criminals. This new crew is tasked with finding out what is causing the folding of time and space, and stopping it - at all costs.

Death surrounds Bahman, a director who hasn't made a film in 24 years (he can't get past the censors). He's working on a documentary, for Japanese TV, on Iranian burial practices. On the anniversary of his wife's death, a hitchhiker tells him a story of spousal abuse and infant mortality, he discovers that someone has been buried in his plot next to his wife, and he needs the help of his attorney, a well-connected fixer. He dreams of death, even as he investigates it for his film. His niece's husband, a well-known writer, fails to return home; he searches hospitals for an unclaimed body. His heart disease is flaring up. Is he prepared for death? Is that all that's left?

The year is 2021 AD. Women have been enslaved by a brutal army of men who survived the nuclear holocaust. Their only hope for freedom is in the hands of a nomadic band of fierce she-warriors: The Sisterhood.

Teenage Claire (Morgan Thompson) would rather hang out with her friends at the mall than to stay home with her brother Matt while Grandma babysits. Who wouldn't? Unfortunately, Grandma isn't about to let Claire out of the house. Worse, she insists that Claire and Matt listen to her reworking of the Brothers Grimm classic tale "Little Red Riding Hood". Fortunately, Grandma has a sense of humor, and adds some modern twists. Claire imagines herself as Red, and her brother, parents and grandma as....her brother, parents and grandma.

Man-boy farmer Donal discovers that his father has suddenly passed away. Now on his own, Donal attempts to lose his virginity by hiring a prostitute to help him get out of his rut. And so he meets Kim, an aging Kiwi escort. After engaging in a strictly sexual encounter, their relationship soon progresses into a lusty romance, then to a business enterprise between two partners. Through these exploits, Donal and Kim provide each other with a sense of love and belonging that neither experienced beforehand.

Six friends, stranded on a highway, tell each other scary stories.

H.G. Wells foresaw the future in such visionary novels as The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds. On a night in London in 1946, newspaper reporter Ellen McGillivray arrives at the home of legendary literary figure, Herbert George Wells. Expecting to hear of the events and people who formed his prophetic imagination, she is informed of a world in which known scientific boundaries no longer exist. It begins a half-century earlier at London's Imperial College of Science where Wells meets Jane Robbins, a scientist equally fascinated by unnatural phenomenon, and a woman who immediately captures Wells' heart. To Wells' surprise, Ellen accepts his outlandish tales of traveling through time. What Ellen is about to discover is that at the heart of the mysterious orb is buried the equally mysterious heart of Jane Robbins, the one who inspired H.G. Wells to tell the amazing truth in the form of science "fiction."

A madman haunted by the ghost of his ex-wife carves a corpse-laden trail.

An innocent and beautiful girl, Linnea rents an apartment in Stockholm just before WWI. As she works for an old man who owns a photography studio she meets Anna, a photographer with whom she develops a complex friendship. Anna’s circus-performer boyfriend and European politics complicate Linnea’s routine.

Se-jin, a lonely department store employee, moves into a high-rise apartment building. One day she notices that the lights in the windows of the building opposite all start to mysteriously flicker at exactly 9:56pm. She begins to suspect that these occurrences are somehow linked to a series of suspicious deaths in the neighbourhood.

In a small town in occupied France in 1941, the German officer, Werner Von Ebrennac is billeted in the house of the uncle and his niece. The uncle and niece refuse to speak to him, but each evening the officer warms himself by the fire and talks of his country, his music, and his idealistic views of the relationship between France and Germany. That is, until he visits Paris and discovers what is really going on ...