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Movie Reviews By Paul


BEST OF 2007 by KEVYN KNOX

More than anything else this year, the thing that struck me was the power of the American film. Seven of my top ten films were made in America, which I believe may be a record for this rather foreign-leaning critic. More though even than this surprise upturn in American cinema was the fact that 2007 produced not one (which most years are hard pressed to even accomplish), but two truly great films - both incidentally, made in America. This is something that hasn't happened in a single calendar year since 2001 when three great films made the circuit. That year gave us the US releases of David Lynch's Mulholland Dr., Béla Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies and Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood For Love. Only one of them from the US though. 2007 gave us two works of American art, and threw in a thirty year old surprise love child to boot. Toss in seven other films and this year's top ten is one of the strongest overall in a long time - especially where the young maverick semi-indie, semi-studio auteurs such as P.T. Anderson, Todd Haynes, David Fincher and the Coen Brothers are concerned. This may indeed be a troubled time in America (from the white house on down) but cinema (mainstream Hollywood notwithstanding) is not among the casualties. With that said, here are my choices for the best films of 2007.

 

 

#1There Will Be Blood  (Paul Thomas Anderson) SEE REVIEW BELOW!!!!!

 

After all the dust had settled. After all the hoopla of the year end was over. After all the lists were compiled and the top tens set in a nice orderly line. After I thought everything was a final go, along comes an eleventh hour spectacle that puts them all to shame (most of them at least) and knocks everyone down a peg. Holding off on announcing my Best of 2007 until a certain press screening on January 3rd, it all came to fruition and damn, was it ever worth the wait. Zooming in at the last second, acting as the long awaited hero (or anti-hero I suppose in this case) making the cliffhanger of a rescue, was Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, a Wellsian - by way of Kubrick - work of American art audacious enough to fill even the deepest hole left by the wake of nearly three decades of Hollywood studio fodder. Paul Thomas Anderson, self-taught, self-stylized auteur of cinematic genuflection (that's a paraphrasing of Matt Zoller Seitz's comments in the New York Times) has set out over the years (this is his fifth feature) to create the great American film in the likes of Orson Welles or John Ford or D.W. Griffith, and after a string of hits and misses, that is exactly what Anderson has accomplished with his ode to greed, desire and God, There Will Be Blood. Now who's genuflecting?

 

#2 I'm Not There (Todd Haynes)

Going into Todd Haynes' experiment in semiotic filmmaking and deconstruction of cinema, I was wary of what I would think coming out. I knew this was a film I would not think lightly of and toss aside as one of the myriad mediocrities of moviemaking, but instead either completely love or absolutely despise. There would be no middle ground here. My great admiration for Bob Dylan and my deep and everlasting love of the cinema would not allow me to be on the fence on this one. It was either do or die. Well, I suppose it's obvious, considering this is my top ten list of 2007, which way I went after leaving the theatre. A brilliant filmic essay, a la Jean-Luc Godard, that not only questions the idea of biopic - and cinema itself - but beats it until it is no longer recognizable. Played by six different actors (Cate Blanchett in her androgynous quasi-fellini black & white take on the prophet Dylan is at her mimicking best), we get to see the "life" of Bob Dylan as dreamt by Todd Haynes, via the ghost of the still-quite-living Mr. Zimmerman himself - all without ever uttering the name Bob Dylan. Haynes has unleashed a nearly indescribable treatise upon cinema, and though it may be too much for the common filmgoer (who needs them anyway!?), it is one of the most deceptively powerful films to come out of America in a long while.

 

 

#3Killer of Sheep(Charles Burnett)

Perhaps it is a bit of a cheat to place this 1977 film amongst the best of 2007, but Killer of Sheep is much less repertory than its production date alludes to - a smattering of unheralded screenings at various festivals and museums doth not a formal movie release make. But now, a generation and a half later, sitting in that darkened theatre in the West Village, watching Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep, which garnered its first theatrical run of any merit (and eventual Criterion dvd release) in the spring of 2007, felt a lot like how it must have felt for Howard Carter opening up that 3000+ year old dusty sepulchral chamber and finding the unbelievable riches of King Tut laid out before him. Unbeknownst to most, Killer of Sheep showed up about thirty years late but was certainly worth the wait. Powerfully subtle, Burnett's excavated masterpiece of understatement and gallant workingman beauty, a film that took more blood and sweat and tears than most (a debut feature that rivals Cassavetes Shadows and Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali for sheer innocent bravura) is surely the filmic archeological find of the year.

 

 

#4 The Wayward Cloud  (Tsai Ming-liang)

Not quite as old as Killer of Sheep, The Wayward Cloud, Tsai Ming-liang's smutty candy-coloured minimalist musical ode to watermelon sex, made its debut at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival but did not recieve a proper, if not a bit truncated, US release until 2007. Surely Tsai's most audacious film yet - and this from a filmmaker whose name could very well be the Chinese equivalent of audaciousness (I don't know, I'm no linguistic expert) - The Wayward Cloud has also become the auteur's most reviled film to date. With a hate/love ratio of about 10 to 1, it was Tsai's other 2007 release, I Don't Want to Sleep Alone which recieved the lion's share of accolades handed out to the Taiwanese provocateur this year. Sure, that film is a wonderful film (you can find it ensconced amidst the honourable mentions below) but it was The Wayward Cloud, with its intoxicating mixture of pornography, unsimulated sexual violations (including one of the most disturbing blow-jobs ever "caught" on film), an array of Jacques Demy-inspired musical numbers straight out of a Busby Berkeley Penthouse letter and watermelons watermelons watermelons, that blew me away. A candy-coated cum-swollen cacophonous confection of coitus comeupance.

 

 

 

#5No Country For Old Men (Joel & Ethan Coen)

Leave it to the Coen Brothers to create a villain so enthusiastically abhorrent, so gleefully efficient, so entertainingly reprehensible that you find yourself almost rooting for him to win. From the moment Javier Bardem's Anton Chigurh, assassin to the nth fucking degree, comes on the screen to the moment he finally leaves it, we are enthralled. We are totally obsessed. Whether we want to admit it or not, we are completely absorbed by this vile, yet quite adroit, creature of killing. And he is just one third of this great film. Add in Tommy Lee Jones in one of his most amusingly malaisical roles to date and Josh Brolin queitly carrying the film as if some neuvo John Wayne, place it all in the Coen Brothers version of John Ford's Monument Valley and you get the most sophisticated film yet to appear in their already quite stunning, if not a bit shticky, oeuvre. A modern western in every sense of the word except the time period, No Country For Old Men plays out with unexpected mythical overtones lain across its broad shoulders. The Coens have finally grown up and look what wonders they can produce.

 

 

#6Regular Lovers(Philippe Garrel)

May 1968 was not only a tumultuous year in politics and social order but also in the world of cinema. There is cinema that can be called pre-May '68 and then their is cinema that can rightfully be called post-May '68, then there is Philippe Garrel's Les Amants réguliers, or Regular Lovers, which can only be described as not pre or post, but of May 1968. Rarely screened outside of Europe, Garrel's films are unknown to most (including this critic, who has only this film as a barometer for the cinema of Garrel) which may be a crime against cinema. Taking place in and around Paris in 1968 and 1969, and starring his own son, Louis as his on screen doppelganger, Garrel has unleashed a neo-Nouvelle vague film replete with students rioting and philosophizing as a war of sorts goes on around them. Shot in crystal crisp black and white and meandering along at a very pretentiously French-paced three hours and twenty some minutes, Garrel's angst-frothed film, the epitome of auteur driven cinema, is a cinephile's wet dream come to glittering big screen life. Yippie.

 

 

#7Zodiac(David Fincher)

A movie that proved (finally) that the chase is the thing. Not intent on discovering the identity of the infamous Zodiac killer so much as showing one man's life-long obsession with that very same quest of discovery, David Fincher, maverick camera manipulator that he is, has turned the story of a never-solved serial killer into a Law & Order-esque procedural of obsessive, voyeuristic - violating even - cinema. From the man who inexplicably scared the bejeezus out of us with the somewhat overzealous Se7en, fucked with our heads in the twistedly gleeful Fight Club and gave us all empathetic cases of claustrophobia with the often underrated Panic Room, Zodiac is a sinister take on compulsion, fixation and pop culture mania that has less to do with the Zodiac killer than with the men searching for him. In sum, both lurid in its fact-checking euphoria and titillating in its methodic melody, Zodiac is anything but a thriller in any of the genre's preconcieved notions of exactly what a thriller should be, yet never, in any of its two hour and forty minute running time, and no matter how forensically obsesseed (or CSI-geeked) it may get, does the sense of threat ever dissapate.

 

 

#8Grindhouse(Quentin Tarantino & Robert Rodriguez)

Many other critics have ignored half of this double feature experiment, and instead have piled lavish praise upon Quentin Tarantino's portion, Death Proof (which was elongated, prettied-up and has been released on dvd in its own right), all but tossing Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror into the trash heap, but here and now I am placing the film as a whole - the way I first saw it in that over-crowded midnight theatre last April - upon this list. Sure, Tarantino's half is by far the better film (he is the stronger filmmaker of the duo after all) but what most forget is that this little experiment was meant as an homage to the grindhouse film style of the 1970's - a shottily done, low class exploitational moviemaking trend that never got any further than midnight showings at run down inner-city cinemas, the drive-in late show and Quentin Tarantino's teenage wet dream video collection - and because of that, it is actually Rodriguez's zombie-porn half of the double bill that is most like what grindhouse was, or is. Tarantino's tale of Kurt Russell and his killer car (with references to about two dozen different films) is actually too good to be grindhouse. All-in-all though, the two films together, with all their blips, buts and man-made scratches, and with the grotesquely hilarious fake trailers made to play inbetween the features (helmed by Rob Zombie, Eli Roth, Edgar Wright and Rodriguez himself), Grindhouse, in the way I first saw it (and in a way that will probably never be seen again save for a possible midnight cult run at IFC Center in the future) is one of the best films of 2007.

 

 

 

#9The GoodTimesKid(Azazel Jacobs)

When your daddy is one of the lynchpins of experimental cinema in the United States - and the world - your future has got to be a bright one, for you too can become one of the most underrated, underexposed, unheard of by most, avant-gardist auteurs in the history of cinema. With TheGoodTimesKid, Azazel Jacobs, son of legendary, if not quite a household name, Ken Jacobs, the man responsible for the brilliantly deceptive 1969 experimental bon mot Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son and the découpage juggernaut, 40 years in the making, Star Spangled to Death, gives us (and by us I mean myself, J. Hoberman and about three other film geeks from the East Village) one of the sweetest, funniest romances of the year. A melange of his paternally encrusted experimental roots, an obvious lust for the early French New Wave, live action Fleischer Brother quirkiness, Jim Jarmusch's brain in a jar, indie-pop licks and a screwball heart, all glazed over with a sort of low-def Boho Lubitsch touch, Jacobs' film - which played for exactly seven days in January of 2007 at the Anthology Archives in New York and has still not seen the shiny side of a dvd - is the one film of 2007 most in need of watching - mainly because so many have not.

 

 

#10 Black Book(Paul Verhoeven)

A year ago, if someone had told me a film by the director responsible for RoboCop, Basic Instinct and Showgirls, would wind up finding a place on my yearly top ten list, I would have probably spat in their face and called them a vicious liar and stomped out of the room, never to lay eyes upon them again, but nonetheless, warning unheeded, here is that very same film. Black Book, filmed in Verhoeven's native Holland (his first foray into the cinema of his homeland in nearly twenty-five years) is a tale of espionage and intrigue in the grand tradition of old Hollywood noir. Of course their is the requisite Verhoeven schlock and poor taste, but for some reason it works here much better (and much more formfitting) than anywhere else in the director's somewhat sleazy Hollywood oeuvre. It's as if Casablanca had a facelift and a tummy tuck and then went in for a hot steamy Brazilian wax. This may not be Verhoeven's best - I am still woefully blind toward his early Dutch works (Katie Tippel, Soldier of Orange, The Fourth Man, Turkish Delight) - but it is surely a remarkable work of quasi-sexual artiface.

 

 

A Tryptych of Runner-up Musicals:

La Vie en Rose(Olivier Dahan) - A whirling dervish of a biopic, probably more fiction than fact, whose one most impressive all-in-one-take scene is hands-down the shot of the year. Oh yeah, add to that one of, if not the best female performance of the year and the music of Edith Piaf on top of that and you no longer care if the film is as fictitious as the allusively daydreaming singer's own autobiographical accounts were.

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (Tim Burton) - Combine Johnny Depp with Tim Burton (for the sixth time by the way) and toss in Burton's come-hither period-goth missus, Helena Bonham Carter, a litany of Brechtian imagery and a full-throated shout of Stephen Sondheim - not to mention buckets of candy-coloured blood gleefully tossed about the set - and you have one rolicking good time.

Once (John Carney) - The musical that really isn't a musical - at least by common standards - this tiny little Irish film about a down-and-out singer-songwriter and a lost soul of a Czech emigre is a thoroughly warm-hearted film - and without the sentimental crap one normally finds alongside such emotion. Oh yeah, and the music is pretty damn good too.

 

 

 

 

 

A slew of honourable mentions (making this a top 29 list):

Lady Chatterley (Pascale Ferran); Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg); 12:08 East of Bucharest (Corneliu Porumboiu); Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (Sidney Lumet); I Don't Want To Sleep Alone (Tsai Ming-liang); Dans Paris (Christophe Honoré); Margot at the Wedding (Noah Baumbach); The Boss of It All (Lars von Trier); Day Night Day Night (Julia Loktev); 28 Weeks Later (Juan Carlos Fresnadillo); The Last Winter (Larry Fessenden); Red Road (Andrea Arnold); Private Property (Joachim Lafosse); Belle Toujours (Manoel de Oliveira); Charlie Wilson's War (Mike Nichols); The Simpsons Movie (David Silverman).

 

Five films I missed that may (or may not) have made the list:

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu); Colossal Youth (Pedro Costa); Persepolis (Vincent Paronnaud & Marjane Satrapi); Southland Tales (Richard Kelly); The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik).

 

 

A FILM REVIEW BY KEVYN KNOX

THERE WILL BE BLOOD (95 out of 100)

Beginning with a buzzing disturbance straight out of a Kubrickian nightmare (or is it a Lynchian nightmare?) and ending in a Brechtian feast of gruesome delight that one has to see to believe, Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood is a monster of a movie - more monstrous than anything King Kong could ever dream of serving up. It is some sort of Orson Welles, John Ford, D.W. Griffith, Stanley Kubrick, John Huston, Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese, Sergio Leone, Erich von Stroheim monstrosity of a motion picture. A cinematic amalgamation of the whole of film history, with arms and legs and heads and horns of all those auteurs that came before him, Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood is a billion-eyed beast of a movie that goes far beyond anything any of us thought Anderson was ever capable of - or pretty much anyone was capable of. Movie y mano, Anderson venomously concocts a near perfect mixture of madness and mise-en-scene to create a motion picture of undeniable cinematic bravura.

Taking Upton Sinclair's Oil! (or at least the first few chapters and epilogue) and transposing it into a postmodern Citizen Kane, Anderson has perfected the very art of auteur filmmaking. Taking what he did with the essence of Scorsese in Boogie Nights and the spirit of Altman in Magnolia, Anderson has multiplied it a million fold with the biblical monster movie There Will Be Blood, and going beyond mere imitation or homage like De Palma or Tarantino, he has entered a magical realm of honest loving cinematic genuflection the likes of which we have not seen from an American director, with the lone blazing exception of David Lynch and his Mulholland Dr., since the days of the director driven cinema of the 1970's American New Wave. This is a bold new American cinema being born, Phoenix-like, from the bloody ashes of all that came and went before. As iconically American as Kane or Chinatown or Taxi Driver or Greed - and just as caustic - this motion picture is something truly incredible. This is something that cannot be missed. This is something superhuman, something supercinematic. To sound quite genuflectory myself - and I cannot help but do so (sounding more like a studio adman or perhaps Anderson's own press agent than the hard-nosed film critic I claim to be) - this is not only the best film of 2007, this may very well be, no make that this is one of the greatest films ever made. Ever.

As far as the story goes, it is a tale of old testament fire and brimstone - literally and figuratively. As pertinent today as it was when Sinclair wrote it in 1927, Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood is a staggering monster movie pitting God vs. Greed, and in the end, as is always the case, Greed wins. This is the story of the deceptively named Daniel Plainview, who we first meet in the dark numbing silence of a makeshift silver mine, then crawling on his back, shattered leg in tow, across miles of rocky terrain just to make his claim and finally as the explosively charged self-proclaimed oil man offering up his services to the throngs of genuflecting would be oil barons, all the time growing richer and richer upon the backs of these naive cash cattle with each successive bursting oil well exploding from the dry dusty ground as if trying to escape the very Devil himself, only to find an even worst beast above the surface.

Although blatantly modeled after Charles Foster Kane, from humble beginnings to self-exiled madness, Daniel Plainview, without the crutch of any sort of rosebud-esque sentimentality, is 100% pure monster, from top to bottom, from beginning to end. At one point, in a cinematic moment of Hellish Nirvana, as one of Daniel's wells explodes into an inferno straight out of revelations (his water is oil and it runs with the blood of all those around him) and his adoptive son, who is nothing more than a cherub-faced pawn, is nearly killed and left for deaf, we see Daniel silhouetted against the raging fire, covered in a skein of bloody oil, lording over his "creation" as if he truly were the King of Hellfire. As one watches this scene unfold, one surely begins to realize that perhaps this man, this Daniel Plainview is indeed the very Devil himself.

Played with a ferocity that surpasses even Gangs of New York's Bill the Butcher, Daniel Day-Lewis is an ever-simmering, constantly bubbling, potentially explosive demon of a human being as Daniel Plainview - Moloch devouring all that lies before him. Channeling John Huston's Noah Cross with each and every deep long breath and every hulking purposeful step (as I said before, his water is oil and it turns to blood in his own private 'Chinatown') Daniel Day-Lewis proves once again that he is the most intensely superhuman actor working today - and probably the most powerful since the early days of Brando. Full of spleen for the whole of humanity, Day-Lewis/Plainview (for the method actor and the demonic character become one entity throughout) trepidatiously keeps his evil mostly in check, with only brief shocks of madness, until his full out direptitious mega explosion come the undeniably full-throttled bestial finale that will take everyone completely and utterly off guard with its absurd madness. In short, Day-Lewis/Plainview will drink your milkshake. He'll drink it up! (trust me, once you have seen this film, that reference will make sense to you, albeit in the most senseless way).

Meanwhile, playing the antithesis to Daniel's fire demon is Paul Dano as the meek-willed young evangelist Eli, who wants his upstart church to be able to cash in on Daniel's oil boom. Stomped at as if a tiny bug by the giant shoes of Daniel, never able to defend himself against this goliath, Eli seems to be the very embodiment of sanctimony itself, but do not let that fool you, as with a glint in his eye, Eli is also the embodiment of the church, a church that wants its lion's share of the gold (or oil in this case) making it (the Church, organized religion, supposed Christian values) play out as just as evil as Daniel and his insatiable thirst for power and money. Using each other for their own cause, trying to prove which is master, God or Greed, Daniel and Eli are the crux of a battle between good and evil, right and wrong, God and Man. A war which has been raging since before time began and will be burning throughout eternity - long after Daniel's oil wells dry up and long after Eli's congregation dies off. The only question remaining is, which side is good and which side is evil - or is there even a difference?

And then there is the ending. Analyzed and theoricized to death, Anderson's final twenty minutes of There Will Be Blood is so reelingly absurd, so dangerously deranged, so batshitcrazy that we may think we are imagining what we are seeing. That somewhere during the buzzing madness that underlies the entire film, we were seduced, hypnotized, poisoned or drugged and what we now are watching is some sort of fever-induced nightmare born of the mad blood that is Anderson's movie. We must be thinking to ourselves that this is not real, that Anderson would not end his film in such a preposterous manner. Yet it is just this ending, this Grand Guignol monster ripped from the death grip of Luis Buñuel, that turns this already brilliant thesis on religion, humanity (and cinema) into a work of mad art that will never be forgotten in the annals of film history. Just as Anderson has stripped bare such films as Citizen Kane, 2001, The Shining, The Searchers, Once Upon a Time in the West, Birth of a Nation, Greed, Chinatown, Taxi Driver McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Citizen Kane (yes I said Citizen Kane twice!), fifty, a hundred years from now, filmmakers not even born yet, not even thought of yet, will strip bare the bloody bones of Anderson's film and in turn will create a new American cinema of their very own - and the phoenix shall be reborn - again.

In sum, while many of Anderson's critics have called him and his film pretentious (probably the most oft-mentioned criticism about Anderson throughout his still young career) one must take that as cop out criticism by those who know not how to take this brave film. Beneath the mantle of a different kind of filmmaker - a lesser filmmaker if you will - pretension can easily take down even the best of intentions, but in the hands of certain auteurs - Welles and Kubrick come to mind immediately - pretension, or more aptly that which one perceives as pretension, can be the very backbone of a great film. In the hands of Paul Thomas Anderson (the heir apparent to Welles and Kubrick perhaps?) it is spun as if gold from the guts and groin of Rumpelstiltskin. To paraphrase Truffaut when writing about Johnny Guitar back in his Cahiers days, if one does not like Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood then they should never go to the movies again, for they know nothing of cinema. With that already brazen statement, allow me to make an even bolder, brasher one now. I shall take a word that is tossed about so willy-nilly by studio admen all across the Hollywood hills and mainstream movie critics hoping to see their name in lights (aka as poster blurbs) that it has nearly lost all meaning, all sincerity, and I shall place this word where it should have been all along, upon the most revered pedestal of honour, only to be used in the most extreme cases of canonization. Taking this word - a word I have not used in describing a new film since Lars von Trier's Dogville four years ago, and Lynch's Mulholland Dr. two years before that (and capitalizing it for added impact) - I proudly proclaim at the very top of my lungs and from the very acme of cinematic worship, and with no shame at all in my voice, that Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood is a Masterpiece!! Nothing else need be said. [01/28/08]

TO SEE OTHER REVIEWS BY KEVYN KNOX GO TO

http://www.thecinematheque.com/





















FilmSpeak.com’s FilmNewz for Wednesday, May 7, 2008


Local Feature Information …


Playing at the Midtown Cinema (909-6566 or www.midtowncinema.com) from Friday, May 9 to Thursday, May 15, 2008:


“YOUNG@HEART”(1 hr. 48 min., Rated PG). Young@Heart is a New England senior citizens chorus that has delighted audiences worldwide with their covers of songs by everyone from The Clash to Coldplay. Based in Northampton, Massachusetts, the group is made up of two dozen spirited seniors who specialize in reinterpreting rock, punk and R & B classics from a unique perspective. Their lineup includes former schoolteachers, executives, doctors and food service workers, and the chorus is guided by their longtime director Bob Cilman. With less than two months to go until a one night only concert in their hometown, the performers struggle with the new lyrics and unfamiliar melodies of seven new songs.

DAILY SHOWTIMES: 3:00, 7:00, 9:15 (9:15 show on Fri and Sat Only)


“THE VISITOR” (1 hr. 48 min., Rated PG-13). In a world of six billion people, it only takes one to change your life. Sixty-two-year-old Walter Vale is sleepwalking through his life. Having lost his passion for teaching and writing, he fills the void by unsuccessfully trying to learn to play classical piano. When his college sends him to Manhattan to attend a conference, Walter is surprised to find a young couple has taken up residence in his apartment. Victims of a real estate scam, Tarek, a Syrian man, and Zainab, his Senegalese girlfriend, have nowhere else to go. In the first of a series of tests of the heart, Walter reluctantly allows the couple to stay with him. Touched by his kindness, Tarek, a talented musician, insists on teaching the aging academic to play the African drum. The instrument's exuberant rhythms revitalize Walter's faltering spirit and open his eyes to a vibrant world of local jazz clubs and Central Park drum circles. As the friendship between the two men deepens, the differences in culture, age and temperament fall away. After being stopped by police in the subway, Tarek is arrested as an undocumented citizen and held for deportation. As his situation turns desperate, Walter finds himself compelled to help his new friend with a passion he thought he had long ago lost. When Tarek's beautiful mother Mouna arrives unexpectedly in search of her son, the professor's personal commitment develops into an unlikely romance. And it's through these new found connections with these virtual strangers that Walter is awakened to a new world and a new life.
DAILY SHOWTIMES: 3:15, 6:45, 9:10 (9:10 show on Fri and Sat Only)


“THE COUNTERFEITERS” (1 hr. 39 min., Rated R). Salomon is the king of counterfeiters. He lives a mischievous life of cards, booze, and women in Berlin during the Nazi-era. Suddenly his luck runs dry when arrested by Superintendent Friedrich Herzog. Hand-picked for his unique skill, Salomon and a group of professionals are forced to produce fake foreign currency under the program Operation Berhard. The team, which also includes detainee Adolf Burger, is given luxury barracks for their assistance. But while Salomon attempts to weaken the economy of Germany’s allied opponents, Adolf refuses to use his skills for Nazi profit and would like to do something to stop Operation Bernhard's aid to the war effort. Faced with a moral dilemma, Salomon must decide whether his actions, which could prolong the war and risk the lives of fellow prisoners, are ultimately the right ones.

DAILY SHOWTIMES: 3:30, 6:30, 9:00 (9:00 show on Fri and Sat Only)


COMING SOON – PRICELESS


Also playing locally … “YOUNG@HEART” at the Allen Theater in Annville.


Enjoy,


TODD J. SHILL, ESQ.


 

 

 


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