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THE HABIT OF ART ***** An astounding masterwork that should not be missed under any circumstances. This "live theatre at Cinema Nouveau" features Alan Bennett's (The History Boys) remarkable play that reflects on growing old, on creativity and inspiration, and on persisting when all passion's spent: ultimately, on the habit of art. It gloriously celebrates the Habit of Art: what it takes to be a writer, actor, composer, and even an ordinary person influenced by the art of creation. Directed by Nicholas Hytner, it was filmed live at the National Theatre in London. The cast is led by Richard Griffiths (as WH Auden), Alex Jennings (Benjamin Britten), Adrian Scarborough (Humphrey Carpenter) and Frances de la Tour (Kay the Stage Manager). Read more
ROBIN HOOD ***** This is what film is all about! This epical period drama serves as a reminder of the grand scale and powerful impact of cinema; spectacular in its vision and execution, it offers escapism filled with great adventure, high energy action sequence, and gentle romance at its core. Ridley Scott masterfully delivers a sumptous feast that is rich in texture and could definitely be a contender in next year's Oscar race. Add to this some great performances from Russell Crowe as the legendary figure known by generations as "Robin Hood," Cate Blanchett as the spirited widow Lady Marion, with great support from Max Von Sydow as Sir Walter Loxley and Dame Eileen Atkins as Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, and you are in for first rate entertainment. The story chronicles the life of an expert archer, previously interested only in self-preservation, from his service in King Richard's army against the French. Read more
FAUBOURG 36 (PARIS 36) ***** Hopeless romantics and discerning viewers will delight in this sumptous feast. If you enjoyed Cinema Paradiso you will love this journey into the world of a theatre group who become a family and stick together through hardships and tough times. Set in a suburb of north-east Paris between December 1935 and July 1936 during the "revolutionary" period of the Popular Front (who introduced the first paid holidays and a shorter working week). Three unemployed performers decide to take over by force the music hall where they worked a few months earlier and stage a show there. After the ebullient joy of Les Choristes, Christophe Barratier. now paints a musical portrait of the forgotten life of a working-class district in the Paris of 1936. "A blend of comedy and drama,music and passion, Faubourg 36 could also be called Once Upon a Time in Paris…, like an epic fresco of a working-class Paris that has now vanished, with all its humanity, melodies, colourful characters, trivial events, great expectations and, underlying it all, the premonitory signs of unprecedented world-wide chaos. Closer to fiction than realism, the "Paris" of Paris 36 is based on a poetic and evocative vision." says writer director Christophe Barratier. Read more
EDGE OF DARKNESS ***** An intelligent and emotionally charged thriller set at the intersection of politics and big business, with Mel Gibson in top form under direction of Martin Campbell (Casino Royale). It is based on the BAFTA Award-winning BBC miniseries of the same name. In a rather unusual turn of events, Campbell has now directed "Edge of Darkness" not once but twice, taking on the feature film after first directing the award-winning BBC television miniseries more than 20 years ago. Thomas Craven (Mel Gibson) is a veteran homicide detective for the Boston Police Department and a single father. When his only child, 24-year-old Emma (Bojana Novakovic), is murdered on the steps of his home, his investigation leads him into a dangerous, looking-glass world of corporate cover-ups, government collusion and murder--and to shadowy government operative Darius Jedburgh (Ray Winstone), who has been sent in to clean up the evidence. Read more
9 ***** Every frame is a masterpiece in this extraordinary creation that showcases the art and splendour of animation. Director Shane Acker's animated fantasy epic 9 is the feature-length expansion of his Academy Award-nominated 2004 short film of the same name. The screenplay for the feature is by Pamela Pettler (Monster House). The time is the too-near future. Powered and enabled by the invention known as the Great Machine, the world's machines have turned on mankind and sparked social unrest, decimating the human population before being largely shut down. But as our world fell to pieces, a mission began to salvage the legacy of civilization; a group of small creations was given the spark of life by a scientist in the final days of humanity, and they continue to exist post-apocalypse. Another of their own, #9 (voiced by Elijah Wood), emerges and displays leadership qualities that may help them survive and possibly even thrive. Read more
Other releases
Listed Alphabetically
ARMIDA ** This mythical story of a sorceress who enthralls men in her island prison has inspired operatic settings by a multitude of composers, including Gluck, Haydn, and Dvorˇák. Renée Fleming stars in the title role of Rossini's version, opposite no fewer than six tenors. Tony Award winner Mary Zimmerman returns to direct this new production of a work she describes as "a buried treasure, a box of jewels." The fanciful and magical tale, Zimmerman says, "has an epic, enchanted quality and a tremendous visual element." Read more
A SERIOUS MAN **** Fans of the Coen brothers' unconventional and quirky humour will enjoy this journey into the life of an ordinary man whose life spirals into chaos. Imaginatively exploring questions of faith, familial responsibility, delinquent behavior, dental phenomena, academia, mortality, and Judaism - and intersections thereof - A Serious Man is the new film from Academy Award-winning writer/directors Joel and Ethan Coen. It tells the story of an ordinary man's search for clarity in a universe where Jefferson Airplane is on the radio and F-Troop is on TV. It is 1967, and Larry Gopnik (Tony Award nominee Michael Stuhlbarg), a physics professor at a quiet Midwestern university, has just been informed by his wife Judith (Sari Lennick) that she is leaving him. She has fallen in love with one of his more pompous acquaintances, Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), who seems to her a more substantial person than the feckless Larry. Larry's unemployable brother Arthur (Richard Kind) is sleeping on the couch, his son Danny (Aaron Wolff) is a discipline problem and a shirker at Hebrew school, and his daughter Sarah (Jessica McManus) is filching money from his wallet in order to save up for a nose job. While his wife and Sy Ableman blithely make new domestic arrangements, and his brother becomes more and more of a burden, an anonymous hostile letter-writer is trying to sabotage Larry's chances for tenure at the university. Also, a graduate student seems to be trying to bribe him for a passing grade while at the same time threatening to sue him for defamation. Plus, the beautiful woman next door torments him by sunbathing nude. Struggling for equilibrium, Larry seeks advice from three different rabbis. Can anyone help him cope with his afflictions and become a righteous person - a mensch - a serious man? Go behind the scenes
BADMAASH COMPANY Life in the 1990's was remarkably different for the average Indian. Consumerism had not set in. It was devoid of most of the luxuries of the West. In fact everything "imported" was good, and everything Indian, passé. BADMAASH COMPANY is an extraordinary story set in the 1990's in middle class Bombay (as it was known then), of four ordinary youngsters Karan (Shahid Kapoor), Bulbul (Anushka Sharma), Chandu (Vir Das) and Zing (Meiyang Chang) who came together to start an import business of things longed for by yuppie Indians! What made their venture such a stupendous success was the fact that they found a way to beat the system and soon became the undisputed kings in their business, realising their one dream of making quick money by doing all the wrong things… the right way! Living the life of champagne wishes and caviar dreams, the four friends discover that to make a business successful you don't need big money. All you need is a big idea! With their larger than life schemes, the four go on a wild roller coaster ride into the world of sheer glitz and glamour where the stakes are high and risks even higher! All was well and hunky dory till one day the four maverick entrepreneurs are forced to shut shop… until they come up with yet another perfect plan to beat the system... Just one more time...!
THE BACK UP PLAN *** A comedy that explores courtship, love, marriage and family "in reverse". After years of dating, Zoe (Jennifer Lopez) has decided waiting for the right one is taking too long. Determined to become a mother, she commits to a plan, makes an appointment and decides to go it alone. On the day of her artificial insemination, Zoe meets Stan (Alex O'Loughlin) - a man with real possibilities. Go behind the scenes
BOLT Dimitri Shostakovich's second ballet, Bolt, brings serious and popular music and dance all together including Komsomol routines, Red Army marches, circus acrobatics, and vaudeville antics. Its first and last performance at the Leningrad State Academy Theatre of Opera and Ballet was in 1931. Critics argued that, while the ballet's storyline was topical - addressing the threat of industrial sabotage and the promise of Soviet industrialization - the music and dance were extremely superficial. The story tells of a factory who puts a large new machine into operation. Shortly afterward, a hard-drinking loafer is fired from the factory workforce. He takes revenge by persuading a naive young boy to sabotage the machine by throwing a bolt into its works. Ultimately, the loafer is unmasked as the real culprit and arrested, the machine is repaired and the boy sinks into a dream.
GENTLEMEN BRONCOS What do science fiction space odysseys, popcorn balls, mythical yeast, rebellious teenagers, plagiarism and Dr. Ronald Chevalier's esteemed "anous workshop" have in common? They are all a part of the quirky new universe of the latest comedy from director Jared Hess, the mind behind Napoleon Dynamite. A salute to oddball adolescent artistes everywhere, it weaves together a series of narratives revolving around Benjamin Purvis (Michael Angarano), a loveable underdog whose passion for writing science-fiction novels is turned upside down when his idol, the celebrated fantasy author Dr. Ronald Chevalier (Jemaine Clement), steals his story at a writers camp. Read more
THE GHOST WRITER **** Ewan McGregor is in top form as a professional ghost writer who takes on the task of tackling the memoirs of a former British Prime Minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan), when his long-standing aide drowns. Hanging over Lang is the threat of a war crimes trial and a mysterious secret from his past that threatens to jeopardize international relations. The anonymous ghost writer is quickly drawn into a political and sexual intrigue involving Lang's wife Ruth (Olivia Williams) and his aide Amelia Bly (Kim Cattrall). It is based on the novel The Ghost, written by best-selling author Robert Harris, and was adapted into a screenplay by Harris and Polanski. Resonating with topical themes, this atmospheric and suspenseful political thriller is a story of deceit and betrayal on every level - sexual, political and literary. In a world in which nothing, and no one, is as it seems, the ghost writer quickly discovers that the past can be deadly -- and that history is decided by whoever stays alive to write it. Go behind the scenes
GREEN ZONE **** A political war movie with attitude and Matt Damon as a badboy rebel with a cause to expose the truth. Set in the chaotic early days of the Iraqi War, during the U.S.-led occupation of Baghdad in 2003, when no one could be trusted and every decision could detonate unforeseen consequences, Damon and team of Army inspectors are dispatched to find weapons of mass destruction believed to be stockpiled in the Iraqi desert. Rocketing from one booby-trapped and treacherous site to the next, the men search for deadly chemical agents but stumble instead upon an elaborate cover-up that inverts the purpose of their mission. And at this blistering time and in this combustible place, he will find the most elusive weapon of all is the truth. As he contemplated wading into the world of Green Zone, director/producer Paul Greengrass knew he wanted his next film to grab people by their shirts with a high-stakes thriller, drenched in the authentic details of a war zone. "This is not a movie about the war in Iraq," the filmmaker emphasizes. "It's a thriller set in Iraq, and that's a very different proposition. In my experience, thrillers are at their best when they're in extreme environments where the moral challenges are acute." Go behind the scenes
I NOW PRONOUNCE YOU BLACK & WHITE ** Meet Simon Dawson (Tyrel Meyer). Simon is a white Jewish South African who has just returned from working overseas in the UK. He is introduced to Jackie Msolisi, (Astara Mwakalumbwa) an independent, smart and beautiful black South African girl. Sparks fly and after a whirlwind romance Simon and Jackie announce their plans to marry. Go behind the scenes Writer-director Oliver Rodger talks about getting I Now Pronounce You Black and White to the big screen
THE LAST SONG *** A tearful journey into the life of a teenager trying to make sens of the world, finding her own voice and the discovery of first love. Based on best-selling novelist Nicholas Sparks' ("A Walk to Remember," "The Notebook") latest novel, it tells the story of a father (Greg Kinnear) and daughter (Miley Cyrus) who have lost touch with each other and are struggling to find a way back. It also explores the uncharted territory of young love, as the emotionally closed off Ronnie begins to let down her guard with a boy (Liam Hemsworth) she meets during summer vacation. "This is not a dreamy fantasy," says Sparks, who also wrote the screenplay. "It is about real love on a number of levels." Go behind the scenes
MOTHER & CHILD **** From writer-director Rodrigo Garcia (Passengers) and executive producer Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Babel) comes the moving story of three women (Annette Bening, Naomi Watts and Kerry Washington) and the power of the unbreakable bond between mother and child. It's been years since Karen (Annette Benning) gave her daughter Elizabeth up for adoption, and the decision to abandon her child has always haunted her. On the surface it appears that Elizabeth (Naomi Watts) is none the worse for never knowing her biological mother; she's a fast-talking lawyer who's just landed a high-profile job at a firm fronted by Paul (Samuel L. Jackson), Meanwhile, maternal-minded baker Lucy (Kerry Washington) longs to experience the joys of motherhood, eventually deciding that adoption is the best bet to start a family with her husband Joseph (David Ramsey). The lives of these three women become entwined and none will be left unchanged. Read an interview with writer-director Rodrigo Garcia
PRINCE OF PERSIA: THE SANDS OF TIME *** Entertaining escapism. The popular videogame evolves to the big screen with this epic action-adventure set in the mystical lands of Persia. A rogue prince named Dastan (Jake Gyllenhaal) reluctantly joins forces with a mysterious princess Tamina (Gemma Arterton) and together, they race against dark forces to safeguard an ancient dagger capable of releasing the Sands of Time--a gift from the gods that can reverse time and allow its possessor to rule the world. Prince Dastan must save his kingdom from assured destruction. Go behind the scenes
RED CLIFF It takes place in 208 AD in China during the Han Dynasty. Despite the presence of an emperor, Han Xiandi, China was then divided into many warring states. The ambitious Prime Minister Cao Cao, by using the Emperor as his puppet, waged war on a kingdom in the west, Xu, ruled by the emperor's uncle, Liu Bei. Cao Cao's ultimate goal was to wipe out all the kingdoms and install himself as Emperor to a unified China. Numerous battles of wits and forces, on land and on water, eventually culminated into the most famous battle in Chinese history, where two thousand ships were burned, and the course of China's history was changed forever. That was the Battle of RED CLIFF.
SCHUKS TSHABALALA'S SURVIVAL GUIDE TO SOUTH AFRICA 2010 *** Schuster fans will in seventh heaven with the King of Candid camera doing what he does best. Schuster steps into the shoes of Schuks Tshabalala, a teacher and tour guide to a mixed bag of tourists who are taking his survival guide to SA very seriously. A combination of dramatic narrative and traditional candid camera gags unleashed on a new group of unsuspecting Schuster victims, Leon and Shorty (Alfred Ntombela) are commissioned by the 2010 tourism body to produce a movie as a visual guide and aid for foreigners coming to SA for the World Cup. What follows is a series of hysterical demonstrations of life in SA as they attempt to answer all the questions posed by potential visitors. The comedic results range from South Africa's most famous celebrities being victimized by Tshabalala to a whole new set of Leon Schuster disguised incarnations. Although most of it feels like perfectly rehearsed set ups, the filmmakers state that it is all real and that nothing was staged. Included is a full stadium packed with soccer fans, where the controversial vuvuzela is applied as a tool to test any soccer fan's enthusiasm to the nth degree. Nothing and no one is sacred.
The film also features some Bollywood-inspired musical numbers to allow Schuks to make fun of some of the country's most powerful and influential personalities. Read more Read interview with Leon Schuster
SÉRAPHINE The story of Séraphine Louis aka Séraphine de Senlis (Yolande Moreau), a simple and profoundly devout housekeeper who in 1905 at age 41, self-taught and with the instigation of her guardian angel began painting brilliantly colorful canvases. Go behind the scenes of Seraphine
SEX AND THE CITY 2 ** Trust the Americans to slap glitter on the Middle East! It's basically like watching six episodes of the TV series without a duvet, an endless fashion parade of frocks with the girls showing how modern and cool they can be by loving gays and becoming emancipated Rambos with style. Twelve years, six seasons and one hugely successful feature film. Since its inception, "Sex and the City" has grown into an international phenomenon, with audiences around the world feeling so close to Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda that they practically consider them more like personal friends than fictional characters. "When the first movie opened," recalls writer/producer/director Michael Patrick King, "I would see lines of women at the theaters all dressed up as if they were going to a party, not just a movie. It felt to me like they were excited to celebrate this special time with their girlfriends--both the ones in the seats and on the screen. So when I thought about the sequel, I knew I wanted it to be the continuation of the party. I wanted the movie to be the party."What happens after you say "I do"? Life is everything the ladies ever wished it to be, but it wouldn't be "Sex and the City" if life didn't hold a few more surprises…this time in the form of a glamorous, sun-drenched adventure that whisks the women away from New York to one of the most luxurious, exotic and vivid places on earth, where the party never ends and there's something mysterious around every corner. It's an escape that comes exactly at the right moment for the four friends, who are finding themselves in--and fighting against--the traditional roles of marriage, motherhood and more. After all, sometimes you just have to get away with the girls. Read more
SPACE CHIMPS 2: ZARTOG STRIKES BACK The adorable chimps are back! This animated space adventure follows Comet, the young tech-whiz chimp who longs to be taken seriously as a full-fledged space chimp. Comet journeys to the fantastical Planet Malgor and bonds with the adorable alien Kilowatt, living out his ultimate fantasy. However, when the feared alien ruler Zartog takes over Mission Control, Comet must show he has the right stuff and join fellow chimps Ham, Luna, and Titan to save the day. Read more
X GAMES 3D: THE MOVIE *** A full-length feature film comprised of more than 90% native 3D content that vividly captures the drama and spectacle that play out every year at the X Games. Featuring Shaun White, Travis Pastrana, Danny Way, Ricky Carmichael, Bob Burnquist and Kyle Loza, the film tells the behind-the-scenes stories of the athletes and the sacrifices they make as they pursue glory and progression on the industry's biggest stage.Directed by award-winning filmmaker Steve Lawrence (Down the Barrel) and narrated by Emile Hirsch, the film uses groundbreaking digital 3D techniques to immerse sports fans into the world of action sports. Whether racing downhill on Shaun White's snowboard, flying through the air in Travis Pastrana's Rally car, or preparing to launch down the big air ramp with Danny Way fans will be at the center of the action and get unprecedented access to the X Games and the iconic action sports personalities chronicled in the film.
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