THE FILM:

Reel Injun is a film with a knotty, fascinating, and important story to tell about the intersection of Native American history with the medium--the cinema--that was born just as that history seemed to be coming to a tragic, ignobly inflicted end. Director Neil Diamond (no, not that Neil Diamond) is himself a Native American of the Cree tribe (which inhabits a far northern region of Canada, near the Arctic Circle), and he attempts to give Reel Injun a framing device through his own personal, investigative road trip across North America to visit actual sites of significance to Native Americans while reflecting on the troubled, often treacherous relationship of Native culture to the way it has been depicted in the movies. Along th...Read the entire review

While on the road en route to their honeymoon, Isle (Sandra Julien) asks her new husband Antoine (Jean-Marie Durand) to make a quick little detour: stop off at the castle where her two favorite cousins (Jacques Robiolles and Michel Delahaye) live. Upon their arrival at the castle, they are informed by the two maids (Marie-Pierre Castel and Kuelan Herce) that both cousins passed away just 24 hours ago. Distraught, Isle visits the graves, where a beautiful woman named Isabelle (Nicole Nancel) tells her she was to marry both of them. She tells Antoine she needs to be alone that evening to collect her thoughts. After he retires to another room, she is visited by a vampire named Isolde (Dominique), who begins the three-day process of turning Isle into a ceature of the night.

The Shiver of the Vampires (also known as Strange Things Happen at Night, or the original French title Le Frisson d...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Written, directed and produced by acclaimed Japanese filmmaker Koji Wakamatsu in 2007, United Red Army is a fairly epic one hundred and ninety minute film that delves fairly deep into the interesting history of the militant leftist political organization of the same name that was active in Japan in the 1960s and 1970s. In order to make this film happen, Wakamatsu actually mortgaged his own home, indicating that (not surprisingly to anyone familiar with the director's politics) this was a very personal project for the man, never a director to shy away from controversy throughout his long and storied career.

After some news reel and archival footage the film begins at a simple enough student protest organized to take a stand against the rising tuition costs that are being passed down by the administration to the typically impoverished student body. From here, the prot...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

When word first leaked that Robert B. Weide was working on an extended documentary portrait of Woody Allen, those familiar with his work couldn't help but grin and all but rub their hands in anticipation. Though best known as a frequent director of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Weide's first screen credits were for co-writing the wonderful (and inexplicably hard-to-find) Joe Adamson documentaries The Marx Brothers in a Nutshell and W.C. Fields: Straight Up; he'd also helmed the Oscar-nominated Lenny Bruce: Swear to Tell the Truth. This, clearly, is a guy who could get to the heart of Allen's comic genius.

Other documentarians had tried. Richard Schickel's 2002 TCM film Woody Allen: A Life in Film wasn't so much unsuccessful as abbreviated; at a mere 90 minutes, it barely felt as though Schickel had scratched the prolific filmmaker's surface. ...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

With Project Nim, director James Marsh (the underrecognized The King, and the 1980 third of the Red Riding Trilogy) follows up his popular and acclaimed 2007 best-documentary Oscar-winner, Man on Wire, with a completely different kind of story. Based on Elizabeth Hess's book Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human, the film recounts the luckless fate of the titular chimp, the "star" of a much-ballyhooed (and ultimately disappointing) linguistic experiment begun in the late '70s, whose existence was, for better o...Read the entire review

is not only strongly magnetic, but also one that creates mater fromenergy and doubles in size every eleven hours. At the rate it's growing,it will get so large as to throw the Earth out of its orbit and destroy alllife on the planet. It's up the Dr. Stewart and the members of theOSI to discover some way to stop this menace.

In 10 Words or Less
Shocking cin mav rit , but not for the reasons you think

Reviewer's Bias*
Loves: The Candid Cameraconcept
Likes: Allen Funt, Playboy's Candid Camera
Dislikes: So-called realityTV
Hates: Confronting our unenlightened past

The Movie
I remember, in my younger days, sneaking a peek atthe Playboy Channel whenever I could. In those days before the invention ofalways-on pornography, the late-night thrill of Hugh Hefner's TV offerings wasa filthy holy grail, full of airbrushed, heavily made-up goddesses who wanderedaround hazy settings in the nude to soft jazz or light rock, doing excitingthings like playing with hoses or stretching. But every now and then, there wassomething special, a s...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Argentinean director Adrian Garcia Bogliano's Cold Sweat starts off with some black and white footage that explain to us the background story of a revolutionary political group that, in 1975, stole a whole lot of dynamite, and that this dynamite was never found. Cut to the present day and a guy named Roman (Facundo Espinosa) is sitting in a little red car with a pretty girl named Ali (Marina Glezer), who is using a laptop to talk to 'a blonde guy' who lives inside the house they're parked out in front of. Through their conversation we learn that Roman's philandering girlfriend, Jacquie (Camila Velasco), has been talking to this same blonde guy and that a few days ago she went to meet him, never to be heard from again. Ali's chatting up the same guy in order to get entry into the house so that they can find Jacquie and get her out of there safely.

So, Ali heads insid...Read the entire review

In 10 Words or Less
Nick Swardson + porn - laughs

Reviewer's Bias*
Loves: Kevin Nealon
Likes: Nick Swardson, silly comedies
Dislikes: Potty humor, most Happy Madison productions
Hates: Weak comedy

The Movie
Nick Swardson is a perfect comedic embodiment of the Wolverine Rule. When Wolverine made cameo appearances, served up in small doses, he was awesome. But he became more popular, made more and more appearances and eventually got his own series, and then a movie, which were less than impressive. Nick Swardson has been tremendously entertaining in his appearances on Reno 911! and has been good in smaller film roles like in Just Go With It, but his show Nick Swardson's Pretend Time has be...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Growing up is a weird thing. Some of us fight it, wanting to hold onto our youth for as long as we can, refusing to change with age and constantly struggling against the system, others embrace it and once they're out of college are content to put on a suit and tie and work for a faceless corporation. Anyone who grew up with any connection to punk rock probably falls into the earlier category, but as Andrea Blaugrund Nevins' documentary The Other F Word explains, even punks will change - particularly once kids are involved. The documentary, which focuses pretty much entirely on the west coast scene by covering bands from Los Angeles, San Francisco and Portland, gives us a quick rundown of how rough and tumble the punk scene was in the eighties by showcasing violence at Black Flag shows and using a few news clippings to show how scared the establishment was of these ...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Suspicion (1941) is one of those Alfred Hitchcock movies that somehow works despite itself. The story, about a spinster-like woman who comes to realize that the charming cad she impulsively married might be a killer, must have seemed kinda creaky even in the '40s. Glamorous Joan Fontaine was miscast as the lead, and her fluttery performance (Oscar notwithstanding) hasn't held up too well. As the gambler who woos Fontaine to the altar, Cary Grant made a better impression. The actors' scenes together are terrific examples of old-style Hollywood Star Power, and Hitchcock's skillfully handles their increasingly tense relationship by ratcheting up the suspense - right up until the film's ridiculous ending, that is.

In other words, it's a flawed classic that might do well for an update. That must have been the thinking behind the remake of that film starring Jane Curtin (S...Read the entire review

THE PROGRAM

Most families would be content with one major success story, but for the Bront s success was a common occurrence in the household. The 1973 miniseries chronicles the lives of the Bront children from pre-adolescence to their untimely deaths. Spanning five, 50-minute episodes, "The Bront s of Haworth" takes a route to storytelling that bypasses biopic genre conventions, instead taking the radical approach of treating human beings like, brace yourself, human beings. Narrated by Elizabeth Gaskell (Barbara Leigh-Hunt), friend to the family and fellow author ("Cranford" and "North and South" to name a few), "The Bront s of Haworth" is a dense, dialogue rich drama based on Gaskell's non-fiction book "The Life of Charlotte Bront ," that sheds a bright light on character many know as literary anecdotes or paltry author bios from book jackets.

Those hoping for a light dramatiza...Read the entire review