CinemaWatch

Lakeview Terrace (Neil LaBute 2008)

2009-07-02T15:15:00.000+08:00

Chris and Lisa move into a new house, the neighbour Abel, bad-ass cop and neighbourhood watch afficionado, shows them that he does not approve of their lifestyle. A neighbourhood battle begins, washing up some hidden layers in everybody.I don’t like that kind of film: a completely unlikeable main character, played by Samuel L. Jackson, who can be really annoying, and - as it turns out - who gets

What Lies Beneath (Robert Zemeckis 2000)

2009-07-01T19:14:00.000+08:00

Claire and her husband Norman move into a new house, send their daughter off to college, work on Norman's carreer as a physicist, and try to arrange their lives. But in the new home Claire encounters strange things, hears noises, suspects it to be haunted by a ghost. Maybe by the disappeared wife's of the strange neighbour? She tries to find out.It is great to see Michelle Pfeiffer again - how

Body of Lies (Ridley Scott 2008)

2009-06-21T16:47:00.001+08:00

Roger Ferris is a CIA agent working the Middle East, plotting and killing and trying to get to the heart of the terrorist organisations on the ground directing a series of attacks on European cities. His missions are being controlled by Ed Hoffman, who is sitting in his Langley control rooms, watching the proceedings trough live high-resolution satellite feeds, moving about the troups. There is

Borat (Larry Charles 2006)

2009-06-21T16:36:00.000+08:00

Kazakh report Borat travels with his colleague through the USA to make a documentary about the country for his home tv channel, but reroutes in order to get to California, where he wants to marry Pamela Anderson. What to say about it? Through the hype around the new Sasha Baron Cohen film to be released in 2009, I felt compelled to check out the previous one at last. Reading and hearing about it

Breaking Bad (TV, Vince Gilligan 2008)

2009-06-13T19:36:00.000+08:00

A chemistry teacher gets diagnosed with cancer. He decides to "break bad", grabs a young crystal meth dealer and teams up with him to do some applied chemistry. By cooking the best meth ever, he stirs up some mud in the local drug scene, and soon becomes entangled between police investigation (his brother-in-law, actually), the drug lords, and his family

Coraline (Henry Selick 2009)

2009-06-08T19:45:00.000+08:00

Coraline moves with her family into a new house, and as her parents both decide to mainly ignore her and catch up with publication deadlines instead of helping her adjust to the strange new neighbours or the huge old house, she explores that house on her own. Through a small door, she finds a parallel world that at first glance looks like her own, but with nicer people - strangely, they all have

State of Play (BBC TV Show, Paul Abbott 2003)

2009-06-08T19:25:00.000+08:00

The research assistant of a Westminster MP dies, as does a supposed drug dealer, and a motorbike courier gets shot at. A team of reporters from the "Herald" newpaper set out to dind the story, and when they start linking the bits and pieces, they realise many events are interlinked. Reporter Cal uses his old friendship with the MP Stephen Collins to protect him from a withchunt when it turns out

John Rabe (Florian Gallenberger 2009)

2009-05-19T12:03:00.001+08:00

John Rabe is running Siemens' Nanjing operations for 27 years. Just when his tenure is coming to an end in 1937, and his replacement has already arrived, Nanjing gets attacked by the Japanese forces taking over China's East. Rabe realises that his staying could make a difference, and he helps the international community to establish a safety zone to protect the civilian population from the

Charly and the Chocolate Factory (Tim Burton 2005)

2009-05-19T12:00:00.000+08:00

Willy Wonker, excentric owner of a chocolate and candy empire, invites five children to visit his highly secretive production facilities. At the end of the day, he will pick one of the five to be given the great and secret prize. Funny how some stories are kind of complicated to summarise in two sentences, others aren't. This one is dead simple, and the reason may be that apart from the framework

Tyson (James Toback 2008)

2009-05-19T11:39:00.000+08:00

Mike Tyson recounts his life, from being the fat little boy victim of bullyism to being the unbeatable heavyweight boxing champion of the World. The film only has Tyson talking, with archive footage reminding the audience of the actually quite incredible things he did in the ring. I had not seen most of it, as the Tyson matches were on pay tv only, and noone in our family was interested enough to

Gone Baby, Gone (Ben Affleck 2008)

2009-05-10T14:08:00.001+08:00

Two private Investigators get the job to follow up on the police investigation of a child abduction. The aunt has hired them, the police does not like it, the parents are useless. Investigating the case, the Pis Patrick and Angela discover that the story has reported to the police has been a fabrication, but instead of this clarifying the case, they find themselves entangled in more and more

Apaloosa (Eric Harris 2008)

2009-05-10T13:54:00.002+08:00

Virgil Cole (Eric Harris) and Everett Hitch (Viggo Mortensen) come to Apaloosa, a small town out in the wild wild west that is threatened by the thugs around Randall Bragg (Jemery Irons). After Bragg had killed the former city Marshall, all authority is given to Cole, and he actually manages with wit and ruthlesness to keep things at bay and put trouble behind bars. But things are in towns like

Traitor (Jeffrey Nachmanoff, 2008)

2009-05-10T13:34:00.000+08:00

Samir gets caught and imprisoned in Yemen when selling explosives to Islamist terroritsts. In prison and after, he gets closer to the group and gets involved in their preparations for attacks in the US. At the same time, his path crosses frequrently with FBI agent Clayton, who is trying to identify the people behind the latest series of attacks against US citizens and who thinks Samir might play

Speed Racer (Wachowsky Brothers 2008)

2009-05-09T15:56:00.002+08:00

Speed Racer grows up adoring his brother Rex, a race car driver of outstanding talent. The whole family of racing afficionados is shattered by Rex's death in a terible accident, but Speed still grows to become the next family member to rule the race tracks in his family's self-developed car. After he rejects the offer by the Royalton corporation to join their team of high-tech trained and welathy

The Thing (John Carpenter 1982)

2009-04-16T08:48:00.002+08:00

An Antarctica mission gets surprised by a Norwegian team chasing a dog to the camp and almost blowing everybody up. When the Americans investigate what happened at the Norwegians' camp, they find out that a flying saucer was dug up and something inside must have gotten released. Too late fr protection, as The Thing starts working its way through the camp staff (literally), and the survivors need

Doubt (John Patrick Shanley 2008)

2009-04-05T09:09:00.002+08:00

The story of a monastery / boarding school, where the slight modernisation tendencies of Father Brendan Flynn shake some of Sister Aloysius Beauvier's moral foundations. In her effort to maintain her desired high level of integrity for the school, The Good Sister is willing to follow her gut feeling when suspicions come up against the Father that his relationship to an altar boy went beyond the

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (Sydney Lumet 2007)

2009-04-05T09:00:00.002+08:00

Two unlikely brother: Andy, the supposedly successful one, gets into some bit of trouble when his excessive drug consumption makes him reallocate some company ressources. Hank is more of the loser type, unable to sustain his daughter's desire for school excursions and the regular payments to his ex-wife. But pretty enough so that his sister-in-law appreciates the weekly shag. Brother Andy

Låt den rätte komma in (Let the right ones in, Tomas Alfredson 2008)

2009-04-05T08:51:00.002+08:00

The little boy Oskar must be a rather lonely kid. He plays alone, suffers occassionally from school bullies and has this sad glance around his eyes that loners tend to feature. His new neighbour Eli is a girl a bit older than him, no mother, just what goes as her father, and it looks as if she would be his match. They make friends, even though it is only at night that they meet on the playground

Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! (Mark Hartley 2008)

2009-03-28T09:05:00.002+08:00

A documentary about the dark side of Australian movie heritage, the film show extensive footage from the subgenre of "Ozploitation", and has many of its representatives chat about the good old days when you could do everything with a movie camera, a D-cupped girl and a bit of chainsaw. Most intersting protagonist weirdly enough is Quentin Tarantino, who qualifies only by being probably the only

Cellular (David R. Ellis 2004)

2009-03-28T08:54:00.002+08:00

It was supposed to be a normal morning, sending off the son to school and discussing dinner with the maid, when all of a sudden a group of brutes breaks into Jessica Martin's house, shoots the maid, and takes her captive. They are asking her about her husband and where he is, and threaten to kill her and her whole family. She believes there is a big misunderstanding ("You have the wrong family!")

Silent Running (Douglas Trumbull 1972)

2009-03-28T08:49:00.003+08:00

With a crew of four, apparently on the road for years, the last remaining trees and plants of the US (strangely, or the whole worlds? They don't say) are on their way through space, in a giant spaceship arrangement where the controlled conditions allow for growing what cannot survive on spoiled Earth anymore. When the mission is cancelled and the astronauts are instructed to nuke the remaining

100 Films to see before you die

2009-03-26T20:52:00.000+08:00

For a while (from age 14 to 34, I think), I kept saying that before I die, I want to have accomplished some feats in the world of arts: 1 read and understand Ulysses in the original English version and live to talk about it at least for one dinner party 2 read "Buddenbrooks" 3 quit smoking, because it intolerably decreases my chances of achieving 1.

The Reader (Stephen Daldry 2008)

2009-03-17T21:40:00.002+08:00

Young Michael starts an affair with a much older woman, learns love and passion from her, and does not understand why she walks away from him as suddenly as she had appeared. Years later, law student Michael finds Hannah again, when he stumbles into her court trial, where she is being challenged for mass murder. She was a warden at a concentration camp. Unable to forget her, he takes on the old

Tropic Thunder (Ben Stiller 2008)

2009-03-16T11:03:00.001+08:00

A group of rubbish actors are locked up in the jungle with a rookie director to film the memoirs of a 'Nam veteran. When the director decides to spcie up things a bit by exposing the spoiled cast to the real threats of jungle combat, things go wrong: A real war starts, and it takes the actors a while to realise what it is all about.There are a couple of good things about the film:* the

Valkyrie (Bryan Singer 2008)

2009-03-08T17:12:00.003+08:00

A group of German Wehrmacht officers and civilians puts together an assassination plan against Hitler. When they take in Graf Stauffenberg, frictions about the proper strategy and the best design for a post-Hitler Germany arise. Several failed attempts further, they actually pull of the assassination, blast the bomb under his table, but because of a combination of unplanned events, Hitler