Rated:R Paul (Macfadyen), a prize-winning war journalist, returns to his remote New Zealand hometown due to the death of his father, battle-scarred and world-weary. For the discontented sixteen-year-old Celia (Barclay) he opens up a world she has only dreamed of. She actively pursues a friendship with him, fascinated by his cynicism and experience of the world beyond her small-town existence. But many, including the members of both their families (Otto, Moy), frown upon the friendship and when Celia goes missing, Paul becomes the increasingly loathed and persecuted prime suspect in her disappearance. As the violent and urgent truth gradually emerges, Paul is forced to confront the family tragedy and betrayal that he ran from as a youth, and to face the grievous consequences of silence and secrecy that has surrounded his entire adult life.
Rated:PG Hillary Duff plays Terri Fletcher, star of her small town church choir and a girl with a special gift...an extraordinary voice. When a personal tragedy interrupts her steady life, Terri searches for strength within herself - and she will need it. A surprise acceptance to a summer study program at the country's most prestigious music school in Los Angeles is both an honor and a problem. Her strict father is absolutely against it. Not wanting to hurt her beloved father, yet knowing this is the opportunity of a lifetime, Terri decides she has to go for it. With the secret help of her mom and aunt, Terri heads for L.A. The highly competitive summer program offers a single scholarship for the coming year - a seemingly impossible dream for a small town girl. But with the help of some new friends and in inspirational teacher, Terri finds the will to meet the challenge. Raise Your Voice is an inspirational, music-filled journey of challenge, hope and true love.
Rated:PG-13 "Chicago’s" Queen Latifah and "Saturday Night Live’s" Jimmy Fallon team up in this non-stop action-comedy. Latifah is New York’s fastest cabbie whose skills behind the wheel and souped-up car help an overeager undercover cop (Fallon) pursue a gang of female bank robbers.
Rated:PG-13 Friday Night Lights chronicles the entire 1988 season of the Permian High Panthers of Odessa, Texas, with football players, coaches, mothers, fathers, pastors, boosters, fans and families struggling with ongoing personal conflicts while the team fights for a state championship.
A town for sale, Odessa, Texas has seen better days--the financial bust evident in its boarded-up shops and broken lives. Yet one hope sustains the community where, once a week during the fall, the town and its dreams come alive beneath the dazzling and disorienting Friday night lights...when the Permian High Panthers take to the field. In a city where economic uncertainty has eroded the spirit of its inhabitants, nearly everyone seeks comfort in the religion of the Friday night ritual, where the unfulfilled dreams of an entire community are shifted onto the shoulder pads of a team of high-school athletes.
Friday Night Lights captures the frenzy of a small town that reveres its school team and their weekly games. With Odessa standing in for places just like it all across America, the film provides an illuminating look at the hoped-for successes and the built-in failures of trying to live the American Dream through the efforts of a group of talented young men.
Rated:R It's the 1660s, and Edward 'Ned' Kynaston is England's most celebrated leading lady. Women are forbidden to appear on stage and Ned profits, using his beauty and skill to make the great female roles his own. But King Charles II is tired of seeing the same old performers in the same old tragedies. Since no one will take him up on his suggestion to improve Othello with a couple of good jokes, he decides to liven the royal palate by allowing real women to tread the boards. In a slightly less progressive spirit, he rules that men may no longer play women's parts. This is good news for the monarch's mistress, the saucy, stage-struck Nell Gwynn. It is also good news for Maria, Kynaston's lovelorn young dresser who has been secretly performing at a seedy tavern in lavish costumes borrowed from her employer. It is very bad news for Ned, who plummets from his exalted position as one of London's most desirable females to become a virtual nobody, virtually overnight. Cast out of the spotlight, Ned seems headed for burlesque obscurity until Maria, now a rising star, takes it upon herself to make a man of him again.
Rated:PG-13 At night and on weekends, four men in a suburban garage have built a cottage industry of error-checking devices. But, they know that there is something more. There is some idea, some mechanism, some accidental side effect that is standing between them and a pure leap of innovation. And so, through trial and error they are building the device that is missing most. The story of "Primer" is what happens when two of these men find the device and immediately realize that it is too valuable to market. The limit of their trust in each other is strained when they are faced with the question, "If you always want what you can't have, what do you want when you can have anything?"
Rated:R Four generations of men are suddenly brought together by the chance to uncover the truth about their family’s past. It’s a journey that takes them out on the road to a world full of surprises – some comic, some dramatic, and all of them personal. The film is written and directed by Jordan Roberts and stars Michael Caine, Christopher Walken, Josh Lucas, Jonah Bobo and Glenne Headly.
Rated:NONE "Tarnation" is as fiercely personal a self-portrait as can be recalled. Having documented his life since the age of eleven, Jonathan Caouette weaves a psychedelic whirlwind of snapshots, Super-8 movies, answering machine messages, video diaries, early short films, snippets of '80s pop culture and dramatic reenactments to create an epic portrait of an American family torn apart by dysfunction and reunited through the power of love. The film begins with 31-year-old Caouette learning of his mother's lithium overdose and his trip home to aid in her recovery. Slipping back into the archives of his youth, we watch Caouette grow up on camera, seeking escape from family trauma through musical theater, grade-B horror flicks and the forging of his identity through popular culture.
Rated:NONE "Go Further," the new film by award-winning documentary filmmaker Ron Mann, explores the idea that the single individual is the key to large-scale transformational change. The film follows actor Woody Harrelson as he takes a small group of friends on a bio-fuelled bus-ride down the Pacific Coast Highway. Their goal? To show the people they encounter that there are viable alternatives to our habitual, environmentally-destructive behaviors. The travellers include a yoga-teacher, a raw food chef, a hemp-activist, a junk-food addict, and a college student who suspends her life to impulsively hop aboard. We see the hostility these pilgrims encounter, and watch as their ideas are challenged from within and without. We meet an entrepreneur who runs a paper company that does not harm trees; an organic farmer who believes Nature is his partner; a man who teaches environmental activists to use humor as a strategic weapon. And throughout, we see Harrelson test his belief that the transformation of our planet begins with the small personal transformations that are within the grasp of each and every one of us, after which...we'll go further.
Rated:NONE Silent Waters is set in 1979 in Pakistan, when General Zia-ul-Haq took control of the country and stoked the fires of Islamic nationalism. Ayesha, a Muslim woman who gets by on her late husband's pension and by teaching young girls the Koran, invests her hopes in her beloved son Saleem. But when Saleem takes up with a group of Islamic fundamentalists just as a group of Sikh pilgrims come to town, Ayesha's haunted past turns her present life upside down.
Rated:NONE Between 1962 and 1966, four schoolboys were abused, tortured and killed in Germany‚s Ruhr District. Their tormentor, Jürgen Bartsch, was fifteen at the time of his first crime; nineteen when he was caught. His mesmerizing confession, which frames the re-enactment of his crimes and the circumstances through which they came about, forms the heart of this journey into the dark reaches of a troubled mind. Bartsch's cold and severe adoptive parents, his terror-filled years at a Catholic boarding school, the discovery of his sexual attraction to boys, his desperate longing to never have to grow up with these and other emotionally charged aspects of his life unfold before us, step by troubling step. Ultimately, however, it is the outward normality of his everyday life that underscores the horror of his deeds. Based on original letters and statements by convicted child murderer Jürgen Bartsch himself, this portrait of an adolescent serial killer is haunting and touching, and sheds keen insight on what social constraints can do to the impressionable.
In a remote, isolated village in post-Soviet Armenia, Hamo, a widower with a pitiful pension and three worthless sons, travels daily to his wife's grave. There he meets the lovely Nina, who is communing with her late husband. The two are penniless--she works in a local bar that is about to close down, while he has been forced to start selling his meager possessions. All seems hopelessly bleak, yet as Hamo begins to court Nina, their unexpected union revitalizes them.
Rated:R The film paints an extraordinary portrait of a selfless woman who is completely devoted to, and loved by, her working class family. She spends her days doting on them and caring for her sick neighbor and elderly mother. However, she also secretly visits women and helps them induce miscarriages for unwanted pregnancies. While the practice itself was illegal in 1950s England, Vera sees herself as simply helping women in need, and always does so with a smile and kind words of encouragement. When she is finally found out by the authorities, Vera's world and family life rapidly unravel.