Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on March 6th, 2006
Synopsis
The Bennet family is not rich, and when Mr. Bennet (Donald Sutherland) dies, the estate will pass out of the family’s hands and into those of a rather pompous little twit of a parson. There are five daughters, and their future can only be achieved through marriage. Elizabeth Bennet (Keira Knightley) is the second daughter (improbably described as plain). Her path repeated crosses that of Mr. Darcy (Matthew Macfadyen), an aloof, brooding gentleman who apparently has little use for her or her ...amily. She doesn’t like him much, either. They are both, of course, in for a surprise.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on March 3rd, 2006
Synopsis
In the late fifties, Lanny Morris (Kevin Bacon) and Vince Collins (Colin Firth) are a top-rated comedy duo, hosts of a polio telethon. At the height of their career, everything comes crashing down when the body of a young woman is discovered in the bathtub of their hotel suite. They have cast-iron alibis, but the team is dissolved. Fifteen years later, up-and-coming journalist Karen O’Connor (Alison Lohman) lands a sweetheart deal to write a book about Vince, and he is being paid a million d...llars to agree to in-depth interview. What Karen really wants to know is what really happened to that young woman, but she also quickly becomes ensnared in the angled web of guilt shared by the two men.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on March 1st, 2006
Synopsis
Plenty of Japanese horror films have storylines that vary from the oblique to the opaque. Pulse is no exception, so forgive me if this synopsis is a bit confusing (or confused). An internet website offers visitors the chance to see actual ghosts. Viewing the footage seems to make one vulnerable to an actual visitation, and when someone encounters a ghost, that person withdraws from others, shunning all society, and becomes consumed by loneliness to the point of suicide or something ev...n more bizarre. All of this is slowly being uncovered by two groups of friends, even as the plague of ghostly encounters spreads far and wide.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on February 28th, 2006
Synopsis
Dana Andrews was never an actor who radiated warmth, and here he is perfectly cast as a hardboiled con artist on the lookout for number one. He arrives in a small town and falls hard for sultry waitress Linda Darnell. She is holding out for marriage, but marriage with financial stability, which Andrew can’t offer. So he sets about seducing Alice Faye with the idea of fleecing her of her fortune.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on February 28th, 2006
Synopsis
Valentina Cortesa plays a survivor of the Belsen concentration camp. She has lost everything in the war. Her best friend in the camp is a woman whose infant child is being looked after in the USA, and when this woman dies shortly before liberation, Cortesa decides to adopt her identity, since no one alive would remember what she looks like. Once in the States, she meets and falls in love with Richard Basehart, the guardian of her “son.” Moving into their home in San Francisco, she sense host...lity on the part of the nanny (Fay Baker). She soon begins to fear for her life, and grows terrified of her husband.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on February 25th, 2006
Synopsis
Donnie Wahlberg plays a cop whose past, to say the least, is checkered. He is drawn into a very personal confrontation with Jigsaw (Tobin Bell) when the killer kidnaps his son. Jigsaw wants Wahlberg to sit and listen to him if he wants his son to live. The boy, meanwhile, is trapped in a house where the air is slowly filling with a toxic nerve agent, and surrounded by a group of people who, desperate as they are to escape and to find antidotes to the poison, also, did they but know it, have ...ood reason to hate the teen in their midst.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on February 23rd, 2006
Synopsis
Documentary makers Patrick Farrelly and Kate O’Callaghan followed the creation of the liberal Air America Radio, a deliberate attempt to create an alternative to the all-encompassing right wing dominance of the talk radio airwaves. The making of the film took an unexpected turn when the newly born network suddenly fell into serious financial difficulty, and all sorts of stories of impropriety involving its founder circulated.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on February 23rd, 2006
Synopsis
When he was a teenager, firefighter Tony Comes was sexually abused by a Catholic priest. When he and his family move to their new home, and he discovers that his victimizer lives just down the street, the shock forces him to come to terms with his past, and to seek redress. The documentary follows what happens, detailing, among other things, the way the Church circled its institutional wagons, and the terrible emotional cost to Comes and his family as the court battle drags on.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on February 22nd, 2006
Synopsis
In Spain of the early 70s, Javier Cámara is Alfredo, an unsuccessful door-to-door encyclopedia salesman. His wife, Carmen (Candela Peña), desperately wants a baby, but he refuses because of their dire financial straits. The publishing house he works for decides to move into making sex films, and its remaining door-to-door men must film themselves having sex with their wives or lose their jobs. Carmen sees this as a good opportunity to get pregnant, and convinces Alfredo to give it a try. The...two turn out to be very good at making these films. Bitten by the cinema bug, Alfredo has ambitions of making a feature film in the vein of his idol, Ingmar Bergman. Will his artistic dreams be realized? Will Carmen become a mother? And what to do about Alfredo’s non-existent sperm count?
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on February 20th, 2006
Synopsis
Dennis Quaid is a widower Coast Guard Admiral with eight kids. He runs his household with (of course) military precision. His career has taken him back to his home town, where he runs into high school sweetheart Rene Russo. She is a widow (no divorces in THIS movie, thank you very much) with ten kids (four biological, the rest adopted), and her household is a joyful chaos of artistic self-actualization. Quaid and Russo fall in love and marry immediately, and then announce to their kids that ...heir family has just double in size. Cue conflict as the military kids and the artsy-hippy kids collide, and then collude to try to break up the marriage.
