Film Reviews

"World Builder" is a short film by Bruce Branit (co-creator of "405") in which a man uses holographic tools to create a virtual world for a woman he loves. The filming was completed in a single day, but the post-production computer graphics required 2 years.

When Samantha LeBon hatches a scheme to spend a romantic Christmas with her new employee -- the unsuspecting, blithesome James -- his wife, their kids and their two dogs, Rocks and Daphne, must rescue him before he makes a terrible mistake.

When Edward Creighton leads the construction of the Western Union to unite East with West, he hires a Western reformed outlaw and a tenderfoot Eastern surveyor.

In 1975, 10-year-old Amar lives in a village in northern Morocco with his violent uncle, waiting for the unlikely return of his mother, who has left for Belgium. He finds a friend in Carmen, his neighbor, who is a Spanish exile and who works as an usher at the village cinema. Carmen helps him discover a world previously unknown to him.

When a woman is being called in the middle of the night, she finds out that it's not her husband laying next to her.

Over the past two years, Chimerica Media have been given exclusive and unparalleled access to conduct a series of interviews with Henry Kissinger and to film him on a series of foreign trips to China, Israel and Russia. This feature documentary will combine excerpts from the extensive interviews with extraordinary contemporary archive. The result will be a unique insight into the mind and personality of the man who, more than any other single individual, shaped the foreign policy of the United States - not only during his time in office, but afterwards, when he continued to act as consigliere to successive presidents as well as to governments around the world.

The film starts with a story about how two monkeys band together and cooperate to survive in the wild, which is used to illustrate how human society is formed. By casting its characters in a desolate, uninhabited no man's land, the film explores the tension between human's animal instincts and their socially constructed selves. Pan Xiao, a young middle-class lawyer played by Xu Zheng, goes to a rural western town in the desert to handle the case of a falcon poacher who ran over and killed a policeman. Pan wins the case through sophisticated reasoning, forces the poacher to give him his car as a reward and begins to drive home. But unbeknownst to Pan, the car is carrying stolen falcons and before long he runs into a series of unlucky accidents and meets some unsavory characters. After he loses his glasses and accidentally hits another poacher (Huang Bo of Lost in Thailand), Pan is consumed by fear and guilt, and embarks on a real and metaphorical journey back to civilization.

Famous detective Charlie Chan is called out of retirement to help a San Francisco detective solve a mysterious series of murders. With his bumbling grandson as his sidekick, Chan also encounters an old nemesis known as the Dragon Queen who is the prime suspect.

On a planet in a distant galaxy, a power hungry Leprechaun, holds a beautiful alien princess hostage in order to marry her for her royal title. With her title and his beloved gold, he'll be able to rule the universe. While making his maniacal plans, what he doesn't count on is an invading platoon of marines from Earth, to save the princess and foil his plans. An accomplished trickster, the Leprechaun stows himself away on the orbiting spaceship and wreaks havoc on the crew in an attempt to recapture his bride.

Docudrama about American poet Hart Crane, who committed suicide in April 1932 at the age of 32 by jumping off the steamship SS Orizaba.

Elsa and Clive, two young rebellious scientists, defy legal and ethical boundaries and forge ahead with a dangerous experiment: splicing together human and animal DNA to create a new organism. Named "Dren", the creature rapidly develops from a deformed female infant into a beautiful but dangerous winged human-chimera, who forges a bond with both of her creators - only to have that bond turn deadly.

The village of mayor Peppone and Don Camillo, after much dispute, gets assigned a sister village in Russia. When Peppone and his comrades decide to attend the ceremony on the other side of the iron curtain, Don Camillo wants to join. Peppone is strictly against this but after Don Camillo threatens him to disclose information about an earlier side step the mayor agrees. Don Camillo arranges for false papers: He is now comrade Tarocci. Only Peppone and the other villagers know who he really is. In Russia the agenda includes various cultural events: Ballet, Opera, a fishing competition and various parties...

Having lost a bet with documentarian Errol Morris, Werner Herzog eats his shoe.

Dolls is a film about Japanese doll theater and a human love story illustrated through beautiful imagery. This film is a lot more sensitive than most Kitano films.

In the wake of a Supreme Court decision to outlaw the death penalty, California passes an initiative that designates San Bruno island as a dumping spot for first-degree murder convicts, free to do what they like except leave. The main camp of convicts is controlled by the tyrannical Bobby, who rules with an iron hand, and the women are used as sex slaves. A.J. and a group of more free-minded murderers have escaped and gone into hiding. When A.J. and his men liberate the women from Bobby's custody, tensions mount to an all-out confrontation for control of the island.