1997
Running time: N/A
En Gard? Monsieur, by Didier Fontan, is a swashbuckling comedy where a fender-bender escalates into a duel to the death. --Matthew Aquino
Running time: N/A
Michael Clancy's Emily's Last Date chronicles Emily's last ditch effort to find a vaguely human male with whom to have a relationship. --Matthew Aquino
Running time: N/A
Since the beginning of civilization, cities have always lured the rural poor to its environs with the seductive dream of a better life. More often than not, however, that dream is cruelly shattered. Nowhere is this type of tragedy more evident than in the Philippines, where countless young women are sent from poor villages into Manila to work as maids--or worse--for the well-to-do. Frightened and reluctant to leave home, young Elena is nevertheless forced by her father to become the housekeeper for a wealthy woman doctor and her husband, himself a refugee from the country.
Running time: N/A
Three fresh-faced teens cruise aimlessly through the icy cold of a Canadian winter's night. They look innocent enough, but all is not well between Ted, Jim, and Lee Ann. Amidst their vitriolic, curse-filled exchanges, a palpable sense of sadness and self-loathing permeates the interior of the car. Bitterness from dashed young dreams and unfulfilled, immature fantasies hangs in the air like acrid smoke from a smoldering fire. While stopping briefly to buy beer, they are suddenly car-jacked by a gun-toting army vet with a seething anger of his own.
Running time: N/A
In December of 1981, the town of El Mozote, El Salvador was razed to the ground; its one thousand inhabitants--men, women and children--were dead. This film tells the story they are unable to tell. The elements of this tragic story should not sound unfamiliar: protracted civil war; an elite, highly motivated military force facing guerrillas who blend into the populace; superpower intervention; and civilians who can't get out of the way, who have nowhere to go--nowhere because this is their home. --John Porter
Running time: N/A
If you've grown bored with Gen-X filmmakers imitating the violent hipness and Seventies supercoolness of Quentin Tarantino, then you'll appreciate the oddball territory staked out by The Delicate Art of the Rifle. The tenuous plot of this satiric thriller serves as an effective coat rack upon which the filmmakers artfully hang their paranoid conspiracy theories about history and genealogy, economics, real and virtual violence, education, the dangers of philosophy, and much more.
Running time: N/A
Wong Suet Mui is plotting revenge on the Six Cliques. Her parents died at their hands sixteen years earlier trying to protect a magic harp known as The Demonic Strings. She has spent the subsequent years learning to master the harp and all the power that lies within it. Now the time has come to put her plan in action. With the help of a courier who just might be her long lost brother, Wong Suet Mui draws the Six Cliques out in the open so that she may destroy them using the all-powerful strings. A final confrontation ensues.
Running time: N/A
Stephen Brown's The Curious is a macabre tale in which a composer's world is thrown off-balance by his sinister neighbor, optician David Suchet (Hercule Poirot). --Matthew Aquino
Running time: N/A
Ram Prasad Devinevi's Colors of the Sun is the story of a five-year-old boy who gets separated from his grandmother in a busy street market in Madras, India. Thanks to some very eccentric and original characters, he finds his way back home safely. --Hayet Ennabli
Running time: N/A
Is The Closest Thing to Heaven one of those corporate recruiting films, promoting another big city in the south, to a growing high-tech company looking for a new home? You might just start to think that, as the film greets you with shots of the modern Charlotte, North Carolina skyline. But when we are introduced to our guide and narrator, Howard, a dapper, southern gentlemen complete with white suit, gray beard and white fedora who rides a curiously decorated bicycle, it will be obvious that odd times are ahead.