Rated:NONE aving suffered as a boy under a brutal Communist-era coach, champion Hungarian gymnast Miklos moves to Canada years later in search of a new start - only to find himself unwittingly perpetuating the very same cycle of abuse among his own pupils. Redemption appears in the unlikely form of Kyle, a troubled, young Canadian teen with the potential to become a world champion. The friendship and rivalry between teacher and student - each played by actual gymnasts (one, Kyle Shewfelt, an Olympic medallist) - forms the basis of this gripping, resonant sports drama. Beautifully shot and edited, effortlessly evoking its respective time-periods, and through them, the clash of different cultures and values, "White Palms" made its international premiere in Directors' Fortnight at Cannes 2006 and was the official Hungarian entry for the Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award®.
Rated:NONE The film begins as a portrait of acclaimed Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, who specializes in large-scale images of vast industrial landscapes. It quickly develops into a meditation on the human and environmental costs of the permanent and profound changes our planet is experiencing. Director Jennifer Baichwal and cinematographer Peter Mettler follow Burtynsky as he explores modern industrial China, a country undergoing an unprecedented transformation into a 21st century powerhouse. With breathtaking sequences that echo the strange beauty of Burtynsky's photographs - such as the opening tracking shot through an almost endless factory - the film extends the narratives of Burtynsky's photographs, allowing us to contemplate industry's impact on land, people, and culture. Its surface is beautiful, its implications frightening. "Manufactured Landscapes" powerfully shifts our consciousness about environmental change without simplistic judgments or reductive resolutions. It captures a brave new world that manages to be both luscious and unutterably repellent, often simultaneously.
Rated:PG The sequel will take the news anchor character Steve Carell played in "Bruce Almighty" and put him on an Almighty-inspired quest to build an ark in preparation for a great flood.
Rated:PG-13 Based on Stephen King's short story, "1408" stars John Cusack as a debunker of paranormal occurrences who encounters real terror when he checks into the notorious Room 1408 at the Dolphin Hotel.
Rated:NONE There are 40 million sheep in New Zealand and only 4 million inhabitants. After a genetic experiment goes wrong, New Zealand's sheep start turning nasty, and it's the humans who begin bleating.
Rated:PG-13 Michael Moore, director of "Fahrenheit 9/11," the highest grossing documentary of all time, sets his sights on the American healthcare system and the corruption within.
Rated:R Based on Mariane Pearl's memoir detailing the terrifying and unforgettable story of her husband, Wall Street Journal reporter Danny Pearl's life and death. The story covers Danny's (Futterman) reasons for being in Karachi, Pakistan, the complete story of his abduction, the intense effort of his wife, Mariane Pearl (Jolie) to find him during the weeks following his disappearance and his eventual murder.
Rated:R Frank Falenczyk (Ben Kingsley) loves his job. He just happens to be the hit-man for his Polish mob family in Buffalo, New York. But Frank's got a drinking problem and when he messes up a critical assignment that puts the family business in peril, his uncle (Philip Baker Hall) sends him to San Francisco to clean up his act. Played with gruff charm by Kingsley, Frank is not a touchy-feely kind of guy. But he starts going to AA meetings, gets a sponsor (played by Luke Wilson) and a job at a mortuary where he falls for the tart-tongued Laurel (Téa Leoni), a woman who is dangerously devoid of boundaries. Meanwhile, things aren't going well in Buffalo where an upstart Irish gang is threatening the family business. When violence erupts, Frank is forced to return home and with an unlikely assist from Laurel, faces old rivals on new terms.
Rated:PG-13 In a startling mature and nuanced performance, Parker Posey plays Nora Wilder, a thirty-something Manhattanite who is cynical about love and relationships, in this astute collaboration with first-time writer/director Zoe Cassavetes. Nora plugs away at her job in a posh downtown hotel and can't help but wonder what it is she has to do to find a relationship as ideal as her friend Audrey's (Drea De Matteo) "perfect marriage." It doesn't help that her overbearing mother (Gena Rowlands) takes every opportunity to remind Nora that she's still unattached. After a series of disastrous first dates, she meets Julien (Melvil Poupaud), a seemingly devil-may-care Frenchman with a passion for living. Expecting another disastrous ending, Nora tries to avoid making the same mistakes. She finds herself in Paris looking to break old patterns. Inevitably, Nora has to look inward before she can find a new outlook on life and most importantly, love.
Rated:NONE Constance Reid was 23 years old when she married Cambridge graduate, lieutenant, and mine owner Clifford Chatterley in 1917. After a short lived honeymoon, Clifford was drafted to fight on the Flanders battlefront, from which he returned injured and condemned to spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair.
Rated:NONE John Malkovich plays Austrian artist Gustav Klimt, whose opulent, erotically charged paintings came to epitomize the art nouveau style of the late 19th and early 20th century.
Rated:NONE CONSTANTINE'S SWORD, the latest film by Oscar-nominated documentarian Oren Jacoby (SISTER ROSE'S PASSION), is an astonishing exploration of the dark side of Christianity, following acclaimed author and former priest James Carroll on a journey of remembrance and reckoning.
Carroll, a National Book Award winner and columnist for the Boston Globe, is a practicing Catholic whose search for the truth leads him to confront persecution and violence in the name of God - today and in the Church's past. He discovers a terrible legacy that reverberates across the centuries-from the Emperor Constantine's vision of the cross as a sword and symbol of power, to the rise of genocidal antisemitism, to modern-day wars and conflicts sparked by religious extremism.
Warning of what happens when military power and religious fervor are joined, CONSTANTINE'S SWORD asks the timely question: Is the fanaticism that threatens the world today fueled by our own deeply held beliefs?
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