Film Reviews

When a pint-sized 8-year-old kid witnesses a murder he offers to help the police, if they make him a cop, too. Saddled with this streetwise sidekick, a hardboiled cop is forced to take his new partner seriously as they race the clock to bring the bad guys to justice.

In the aftermath of World War II, a former Czech soldier takes charge of a manor formerly owned by a German family. He falls in love with the daughter, who is now a maid, and is forced to confront the stress between his love and his conscience when he discovers her sheltering her German-soldier brother.

Ten short unrelated stories that move chronologically through Slovakia's twentieth-century history as seen from the perspective of life in small towns and villages.

Larry's daughter wants only one thing for Christmas - a talking bear. His daughter's step-dad intends to make sure that Larry can't get one.

The military's attempt to shoot down an orbiting satellite unleashes a space-borne epidemic on a remote, small town. Deputy Max Brody and his girlfriend Brooke must battle their way through an army of infected townsfolk and soldiers as they struggle to save themselves and their loved ones from a horrible, early death. When cannibalism is contagious, will even the strong survive?

A tangled network woven with tiny particles of movements broken out of found footage and compiled anew: the elements of the "to the left, to the right, back and forth" grammar of narrative space, discharged from all semantic burden. What remains is a self-sufficient swarm of splinters, fleeting vectors of lost direction, furrowed with the traces of the manual process of production.

Bibiane is the daughter of a well-known fashion designer who dabbles in modeling when she's not busy helping to run the family business with her brother. But Bibiane has not been especially happy in her work lately, owing in part to an unexpected pregnancy that led her to have an abortion. Bibiane tries drowning her sorrows in alcohol and drugs, and late one night, after several drinks too many, she hits a jaywalker while driving home. The pedestrian staggers away after the accident, and the next morning, Bibiane remembers what happened and is frightened at the prospect that she may have killed someone. When Bibiane reads a newspaper account the next day of a seafood delivery man who died in his kitchen after being struck by a hit-and-run driver, she's convinced she was responsible for the crime. Guiltily attending the man's funeral, Bibiane strikes up a conversation with his son, Evian, and soon the two have become romantically involved, with Bibiane unable to tell Evian her secret.

Two boys (Tamir & Amine) awake one morning to find that their father has abandoned their family. Shocked, they begin to misbehave. While surreptitiously watching a movie, they think they see their father speaking to them and steal the film to examine the frames. Their mother (Achta) eventually despairs and sends them to Koranic school. Unhappy, they plan their escape until the eldest boy falls in love with a deaf girl (Khalil).

A young, underappreciated intern at the ultra-hip magazine Skirt must learn to deal with kissy-face phoniness, model tantrums and bulimic editors, while trying to steal the heart of a dashing British art director from the grips of a supermodel.

Wondering what has happened to herself, now feeling stagnant and in a rut, Shirley Valentine finds herself regularly talking to the wall while preparing her husband's chips and egg. When her best friend wins a trip-for-two to Greece Shirley begins to see the world, and herself, in a different light.

Chinatown Fair opened as a penny arcadeon Mott Street in 1944. Over the decades, the dimly lit gathering place, known for its tic-tac-toe playing chicken, became an institution, surviving turf wars between rival gangs, changing tastes and the explosive growth of home gaming systems like Xbox and Playstation that shuttered most other arcadesin the city. But as the neighborhood gentrified, this haven for a diverse, unlikely community faced its strongest challenge, inspiring its biggest devotees to next-level greatness.

This fifth Danish Dogme film is about six vulnerable individuals whose lives are interwoven. In a city suburb, a young minister arrives to take up duties at a local church. He is persuaded by his assistant to join an Italian night school class, and he soon becomes the centre of a group of people to whom fate has dealt quite serious blows. Gradually each one in the group manages to overcome his/her predicament and find a happy solution. This Dogma production was shown at the Berlinale in 2001 where it surprisingly won a silver medal.

When hot shot, Wall Street dealmaker Jai thinks of putting some pleasure into his 48 hour business trip to Mumbai, Sahil, his young, music-producer friend, drops everything, including his reckless boyfriend Alex, to help him execute the perfect getaway. Hiking the hills and canyons of Maharashtra, amidst half-attempted conversations and sudden silences, business calls and old jokes, the friends discover there is more than just time-zones keeping them apart. Things take another turn when Alex shows up with a new male-companion at his side, throwing up old conflicts and bringing unanswered questions to the fore.

The Yildiz brothers - Celal, Sami and Mesut - still live under one roof - despite their differences. The family bridal shop is doing really badly and they each yearn for a different life: Heartthrob Celal pines for his ex-girlfriend Anna and risks every last cent of their family inheritance for his dream of a mobile phone shop. Sami is searching for true love but ruins every blind date with his anger mis-management. And Mesut, the youngest of the three, tries to combine a cool music career with his strict adherence to the Koran. So when a sweet little baby comes careering into their lives, nothing is as it was before. The three young Turkish bachelors are given a crash course in responsibility.

A very successful stock broker is called to court to testify against a mob boss who was into some inside trading. Andrew Morenski must become Max Hauser and go back to high school for protection from the mob.