Film Reviews

Shakespeare's 17th century masterpiece about the "Melancholy Dane" was given one of its best screen treatments by Soviet director Grigori Kozintsev. Kozintsev's Elsinore was a real castle in Estonia, utilized metaphorically as the "stone prison" of the mind wherein Hamlet must confine himself in order to avenge his father's death. Hamlet himself is portrayed (by Innokenti Smoktunovsky) as the sole sensitive intellectual in a world made up of debauchers and revellers. Several of Kozintsev directorial choices seem deliberately calculated to inflame the purists: Hamlet's delivers his "To be or not to be" soliloquy with his back to the camera, allowing the audience to fill in its own interpretations.

Found footage helps a true-crime novelist realize how and why a family was murdered in his new home, though his discoveries put his entire family in the path of a supernatural entity.

Harvey, a self-doubting private investigator, plans to marry his girlfriend until he is hired to solve an adultery case and discovers the adulterer is cheating with his fiancée. Lost and dejected, Harvey quits his job and wallows in booze and the occasional odd blind date. Meanwhile, Katia, a Jewish woman from St. Petersburg, arrives in Sydney after answering an ad from an international matchmaking agency. But instead of love, she finds her prospective groom dead on arrival.

Herbert Ponting travelled to Antarctica as part of Captain Scott's ill-fated South pole expedition and shot the footage that makes up this extraordinary documentary.

Documentary footage (from the 1950's) and accompanying commentary to attempt to answer the existential question, Why are our lives characterized by discontent, anguish, and fear? The film is in two completely separate parts, and the directors of these respective sections, left-wing Pier Paolo Pasolini and conservative Giovanni Guareschi, offer the viewer contrasting analyses of and prescriptions for modern society. Part I, by Pasolini, is a denunciation of the offenses of Western culture, particularly those against colonized Africa. It is at the same time a chronicle of the liberation and independence of the former African colonies, portraying these peoples as the new protagonists of the world stage, holding up Marxism as their "salvation", and suggesting that their "innocent ferocity" will be the new religion of the era. Guareschi's part, by contrast, constitutes a defense of Western civilization and a word of hope, couched in traditional Christian terms, for man's future.

Stanley Kubrick’s onetime right-hand man directs this perverse, sui generis take on the Sleeping Beauty story which made a splash at Cannes and had an undeniable influence on Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. A jazz musician (Zalman King) falls in love with a comatose woman at a carny sideshow and takes her to his mansion to join his cabinet of sexual curiosities.

A young queen falls in love with her physician, and they start a revolution that changes their nation forever.

Moving from England to California, the youngest cousins of Elle Woods must defend themselves when their schools reigning forces turn on the girls and try to frame them for a crime.

Somewhere in the spanish country, in the 60s. Paco and his wife Régula are very poor. They work as tenant farmers for a very wealthy landowner. They have 3 children. One is backward. The others can not got to school because the master "needs" their work. When Regula's brother is fired from where he has worked for 61 years, he settles down at their little place... An attack against the archaism of the spanish country of the 60s.

Present time. A squad of young soldiers of the Russian army during the march-throw splits from the main group. In order to save time, they decide to cut the path, but get into the strange fog, which transfers them to the past, right into the World War the Second. Boys, who saw fight only in the movies, and imagined it on the training field, get into the heart of the real WAR. Real courage, real fear, real love and hate, and real DEATH. No time to ask questions. Survive and fight for your country!

When Norwegian scientist Marie attends a seminar in Paris on the actual weight of a kilo, it is her own measurement of disappointment, grief and, not least, love, that ends up on the scale. Finally Marie is forced to come to terms with how much a human life truly weighs and which measurements she intends to live by.

A night-club owner takes on the crooks who killed his best friend.

Iconic snowboarder Travis Rice and friends embark on a multi-year mission to follow the North Pacific Gyre's flow. As Rice and the crew experience the highs and lows of a journey unlike any previously attempted, cutting-edge cinematography captures some of the world's most remote environments bringing breathtaking scenery and thrilling action to viewers worldwide.

A nerd gains the friendship of two of his frat brothers when his dad offers them his condo for the week in Palm Springs, and also offers the fraternity a hot tub and jacuzzi if they can help his son find a girl. They meet two guys from a rival fraternity, and make a bet on who can nail the Designated Babe first.

After being discredited as a coward, a 19th century seaman (Peter O'Toole) lives for only one purpose: to redeem himself. Based on Joseph Conrad's novel written in 1900.