Film Reviews

Prospect is the unusual coming-of-age story of a teenage girl on a toxic alien planet. She and her father hunt for precious materials aiming to strike it rich. When the father is attacked by a roving bandit, the daughter must take control.

Two orphans, Polly and Doug, live with their stepmother Lynn; Polly collapses with the same mystery symptoms that killed her father. The kids' visiting uncle, Whitney Sargent, is warned that the symptoms match strychnine poisoning, but that poisoners are seldom detected and rarely convicted. Sure enough, no case can be made against the obvious suspect; so what can he do to save the next victim?

Jody, a juvenile delinquent, escapes from reform school by stabbing a matron and attempting to burn down the building and then takes refuge in a house owned by an ambitious politician David Patton. Despite the hellcat's ample charms, the would-be officeholder wants nothing to do with her and tries to drive her away. She responds by shortly returning to his house accompanied by a gang of delinquent pals and taking him hostage. A sudden act of violence causes more trouble, leading Jody and her gang to hijack David and force him to drive a getaway car to Mexico.

Shaun Evans (The Take) steps into John Thaw's shoes as the younger version of Colin Dexter's iconic creation, Inspector Morse, shedding new light on the origins of the detective famed for his love of crosswords, classical music, real ale, and classic cars.

During a manned mission to Mars, Astronaut Mark Watney is presumed dead after a fierce storm and left behind by his crew. But Watney has survived and finds himself stranded and alone on the hostile planet. With only meager supplies, he must draw upon his ingenuity, wit and spirit to subsist and find a way to signal to Earth that he is alive.

A creation myth realized in light, patterns, images superimposed, rapid cutting, and silence. A black screen, then streaks of light, then an explosion of color and squiggles and happenstance. Next, images of small circles emerge then of the Sun. Images of our Earth appear, woods, a part of a body, a nude woman perhaps giving birth. Imagery evokes movement across time.

Dwayne Perkins' standup special.

Late in the 1500s, an aging tea master teaches the way of tea to a headstrong Shogun. Through force of will and courageous fighting, Hideyoshi becomes Japan's most powerful warlord, unifying the country. Rikyu, through the tea ceremony and floral arrangements, tempers his lord, helping Hideyoshi focus on a single flower or be in a simple room where the shape of a cup is of most importance. But other forces fuel Hideyoshi's ambitions: the Portuguese bring a globe and guns, and he believes he can conquer Korea and China. When Rikyu raises doubts about invading China, Hideyoshi demands an apology, and Rikyu himself must find courage in the way of tea.

Bennie, a clumsy criminal who's touchy about his weight, teams up with his adoptive father's biological (serial killer) son, his employees who in his absence turned his snack-bar into a quiche bakery, a suicidal manic-depressive woman and a Yougoslavian who keeps unintendedly blowing things up. They need to get 300000 Euro to get Bennies father a new liver. Complicating matters are that Bennie is

In this Frenco-Italian gangster parody, a shop keeper on his way to an Italian holiday suffers a crash which totals his car. The culprit can only compensate his ruined trip by driving an American friends car from Napels to Bordeaux, but as it happens to be filled with such contraband as stolen money, jewelry and drugs, the involuntary and unwitting companions in crime soon attract all but recreational attention from the "milieu".

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.

A young, beautiful woman marries a rich old blind man. While in the household she becomes aware of a plot to kill her elderly husband.

In the late 1940's, Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez were America's notorious "Lonely Hearts Killers". Their lethal scam was simple; they would swindle and then viciously murder lovelorn war widows who would answer their personal ads in which Ray would describe himself as a sexy Latin Lover. Based on a true story.

Joe North is a London taxi driver who manages to get himself into any number of sexual situations with various women.

Men, women, and war. Jelena Panic is a young woman in Belgrade in the early 1990s, during Serbia's war with Croatia; she's making a book of her grandmother's diaries from the end of World War II. She takes up with Bogdan, a young soldier recovering from war wounds. He helps her with her grandmother's story, a tragic triangle involving her effete and well-educated husband and an uneducated major, a Chekist who has, perhaps, the power to save a political prisoner who is the grandmother's friend. As Jelena wonders which man was her grandfather (the Chekist or the husband), Bogdan recovers from his wounds and must decide whether to return to the front. Jelena pleads; duty calls.