The Movie:


"The Brotherhood Of the Wolf" is one of the most beautifully filmed, over-the-top, chaotic and fascinating films I've seen in quite some time. It is a horror film, it is a martial arts picture, it is a period piece, it is a mystery, it is many things and remarkably, the ambitious epic largely succeeds at any genre it touches. The film is reportedly based upon the real "Beast of Gevaudan", which terrorized the French countryside in the 1700's, but the film takes that tale and launches the story into something that, while not perfect, is delightfully ridiculous and wholly entertaining.

The story opens in 1764, where Grégoire de Fronsac (Samuel Le Bihan) has arrived in the area to hunt down the creature, reportedly a wolf-like beast whose terrifying attack is shown in one of the film's opening ...Read the entire review

Review:
Room to Rent

Movie:
Room to Rent was written and directed by Khalid Al-Haggar. The film has appeared at several film festivals since 2000, and has won the Best Film Award at the Foyle Film Festival and the Audience Award at the Turin Film Festival. The film stars Saïd Taghmaoui (Ali), Juliette Lewis (Linda), Rupert Graves (Mark), and Anna Massey (Sarah). The DVD is from TVA International, a Canadian studio, and Columbia Tristar.

Ali is a struggling screenwriter in London with little cash and no place to live. When his request for a visa extension is rejected, Ali is told he will have to return to Egypt in twelve weeks. His friend advises him to pursue a fake marriage so he can stay, though the least expensive woman is five thousand pounds. With only three months to come up with the cash, Ali takes on a variety of odd jobs, such as modeling, teaching belly danc...Read the entire review

I guess you can call it a modern lesbian film noir. In the same way that Bound took an updated look at the old noir 'kill a guy for money and try to get away with it' trappings and combined it with some lesbian chic, Monkey's Mask does the same with the 'detective investigating a mystery and getting tangled up with an attractive dame', only this time its a lesbian Mike Hammer or Philip Marlow. She's a private dick that prefers the chicks. An Australian film based on a novel of the same name by Dorothy Porter (no relation to the films star)

The Story: Private detective Jill Fitzpatrick (Susie Porter) is hired by the Norris family to find their daughter Mickey who has vanished into thin air. At first she assumes Mickey, a modern, mopey, teenage Sylvia Plath running around the hipster poetry scene, has just disappeared with one of her many lovers,... that its until the girl...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Director Patrice Chéreau ("Queen Margot") makes her English-language debut with "Intimacy", an explicit and powerful drama that debuted in the US in 2001, surpassing the "R" rating (the film was released with no rating on 8 screens). Often compared with French film "An Affair Of Love", the difference here is that we are not left outside when the doors close and the clothes are removed.

The film stars Mark Rylance as Jay and Kerry Fox as Claire. We do not know how they originally met, but once the film opens, we find out that both meet once every Wednesday for a wordless sexual encounter. There is not love evident in their actions, but the search for love or simply, the search for contact - for someone to see and feel and find comfort with. As Jay says at one point when confronted if he's seeing anyone else besides Claire, "this woman, she's all I've got." After it's ove...Read the entire review

Movie
Imagine a long episode of the X-Files with Mulder and Scully replaced by a woman who can read minds and a milquetoast agent who quietly tags along. Add a little Sci-Fi intrigue, a section about the danger of cults, some violent explosions and a lot of scowling characters and what you get is Mind Storm.

That's not to say it is necessarily bad. In fact, it's pretty easy to watch but considering the volatile and interesting nature of the subject it sure is boring.

Originally made for The Sci-Fi channel the film plays just like a TV movie that wants wider appeal and perhaps a spin off series. The actors are all competent up-and-comers who are all a little bland. Emmanuelle Vaugier plays Tracy a delicate FBI agent who has the ability to read minds, Antonio Sabato Jr. plays her partner and fiancé and Eric Roberts plays Tracy's erstwhile brother David who runs a cult.

It...Read the entire review

The Story: An archeological expedition in Egypt finds a mummy that has no identification although it was buried in a royal tomb. While on the voyage to Paris, the boat transporting the sarcophagus is plagued by bizarre behavior that leads to everyone on the crew going insane and killing themselves. The remains are put into storage, and years later, they are taken out again to be put on the Louvre museums new Egyptian display. While scanning the body, a spirit escapes and begins to wreak havoc in the museum and surrounding areas. Through a very convenient tunnel between her apartment and the Louvre, Lisa (Sophie Marceau) sneaks around in the famous locale one night and is possessed by the spirit. Soon Lisa is sleepwalking into the museum, putting on the corpses mask and ceremonial cloak, able to perform supernatural feats (like making the guards hallucinate), can to read Egyptian...Read the entire review

Roger is a once successful songwriter in need of a hit. The only thing he cant find is "the voice", the perfect vocals that will carry his newly penned hit across the airways. He finds his muse in Samantha/Sam a cocktail waitress whose pipes are perfect. Very quickly, the song is a hit, Roger's career is back on track, and Sam is a star. However, Roger's best friend, Mitch is wary as he sees Roger fall head over heels for Sam. Mitch knows roger has a tendency to get caught up in the moment, wearing his heart in his sleeve, and he doesn't know is Sam is just playing Roger. But, Mitch soon sees that Sam is genuine, and soon she and Roger get married, with Mitch serving as the best man. However, their married life gets complicated when Roger begins to suspect that Sam may leave him, and he concocts a plan to test her loyalty and love by leaving her alone more and urging Mitch to tempt Sam. Mitch unwil...Read the entire review

"I'm Superman...King F---ing Kong. I'll blow you to kingdom come. I'm number one...number f---ing one!"
--Gangster, Gangster No. 1

The title 'Gangster No. 1' may sound vaguely familiar to rabid fans of Stanley Kubrick's 1971 classic, A ClockworkOrange. Though it has yet to see release theatrically or on video in the United States, Malcolm McDowell -- who stars asa violent anti-hero in both works -- boldly proclaimed that "A Clockwork Orange is like a Disney film next to Gangster No. 1".Motion picture promotion is prone to hyperbole, but Gangster No. 1 is unarguably the most intense film of McDowell's since his collaboration with Kubrick decades earlier.

Gangster No. 1 begins in the present day, with a wildly successful nameless, aging gangster (McDowell) receiving the news that one of his old cohorts, Freddie Mays, has just completed his three de...Read the entire review

New period samurai films are becoming a rarity, but 1999's Gohatto (Literally, 'against the rules') is from the important Japanese director Nagisa Oshima, who made shocking social comment pictures in the '60s like Death by Hanging, and gained international notoriety for his erotic 1976 film, In the Realm of the Senses. After a long stint in television, Oshima returned to the big screen with this beautifully realized film, which was anticipated as another daring taboo-breaker. Instead, it's a sober and somewhat frustrating look at sex in the military that refuses to be emotional or to draw conclusions about its own subject matter. It has some themes in common with Oshima's earlier Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. It ought to be required viewing at West Point, because its political-social observations about suppressed gay acti...Read the entire review

The Movie:

The individual at the helm of "Dancing At The Blue Iguana" definitely isn't the person you'd expect - director Michael Radford is more widely known for the particularly well-recieved "Il Postino". While "Dancing at the Blue Iguana" isn't awful, there's nothing particularly remarkable about it - in fact, most of it seems like something you'd see when you can't sleep and click on the cable at one in the morning.

The film actually has a fairly interesting history, though. Radford encouraged his actresses to improvise and create their characters and their history from the top down. Afterwards, filming began and apparently, these stories were threaded together. The result is a picture that feels like it included every one of the bits that the actresses came up with, rather than trying to single out the most interesting elements and keep the pace going - at 123 minutes, the pi...Read the entire review