During the German air raids of WWII, the four Pevensie children - Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy - are sent out of London to take shelter at the country home of eccentric Prof. Digory Kirke, who happens to be the owner of a curious wardrobe. Peering into this wardrobe one day, Lucy finds herself in the snowy land of Narnia, which is mired in never-ending winter thanks to the magic of the evil White Witch, who has proclaimed that it will be always winter but never Christmas in the mystical land. Eventually the other Pevensies find themselves in Narnia, and the four children learn that they alone are the key to breaking the Witch's eternal winter. But while three of them trudge through the snow with some helpful Beavers to join forces with Aslan, the mighty Lion, the fourth takes a more treacherous path and falls in league with the Witch...
It's Christmas season and Clark Griswold (Chevy Chase) promises his beloved wife Ellen (Beverly D'Angelo) and his adorable kids, Audrey (Juliette Lewis) and Russell (Johnny Galecki), to make the most fun-filled and exciting celebration in their lives. He invites his long-estranged parents, Clark Wilhelm (John Randolph) and Nora (Diane Ladd), his Aunt Bethany (Mae Questel) and Uncle Lewis (William Hickey), and his wife's parents, Arthur (E.G. Marshall) and Francis Smith (Doris Roberts), to celebrate a great holiday at their house in Chicago. It should be noted that Clark answers his big family's expectations. In addition to traditional dishes, the Christmas menu includes an exploding turkey on the dinner table, the Christmas bonus bugaboo, the electrocution of a cat, and the police raid which gives zest to the holiday.
The story of an obsessively organized efficiency expert whose life unravels in unexpected ways when fate forces him to explore the serendipitous nature of love and forgiveness.
The Chumscrubber is a dark comedy about the lives of people who live in upper-class suburbia. It all begins when Dean Stiffle finds the body of his friend, Troy. He doesn't bother telling any of the adults because he knows they won't care. Everyone in town is too self consumed to worry about anything else than themselves. And everybody is on some form of drug just to get themselves through the day. After Troy's death, local drug dealers at the school run out of their stash. They convince Dean to get Troy's stash or they are going to kill his brother that they kidnapped, but they grabbed the wrong kid.
Inspired by true events, THE CHILDREN OF HUANG SHI is a portrayal both sweeping and intimate of people who, thrown into an unexpected and desperate situation, discover their capacity for love and responsibility. It tells how a young Englishman, George Hogg came to lead sixty orphaned boys on an extraordinary journey of almost a thousand perilous miles across the snow-bound Liu Pan Shan mountains to safety on the edge of the Mongolian desert. And of how, in doing so, he came to understand the true meaning of courage. During his journey, Hogg learns to rely on the support of Chen, the leader of a Chinese partisan group who becomes his closest friend. He soon finds himself falling in love with Lee, a recklessly brave Australian adventurer whom war has turned into an unsentimental nurse on horseback. Along the way Hogg befriends Madame Wang, an aristocratic survivor who has also been displaced by war, who helps the young Englishman, his friends and their sixty war orphans make their way across awesome (and rarely filmed) mountain and desert regions to a place of safety near the western end of the Great Wall of China.
Television made him famous, but his biggest hits happened off screen. "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind" is the story of a legendary showman's double life - television producer by day, CIA assassin by night. At the height of his TV career, Chuck Barris was recruited by the CIA and trained to become a covert operative. Or so Barris said.
According to this thrilling drama, the three most powerful men in the world are the President of the United States, the President of Russia and the captain of a nuclear missile submarine. But it happens in a war that the fate of mankind depends on the fulfillment of an order and then the lives of millions of people are in the hands of the captain. It only depends on his self-control and brains whether or not the tide will be crimsoned with blood in the morning.
For freelance hitman Chev Chelios (Jason Statham) the day begins with bad news. He receives a message from a rival thug, Ricky Verona (Jose Cantillo), who reveals that Chev has been injected in his sleep with rare poison from China and he is only an hour away from perishing. Chev learns from his friend, Doc Miles (Dwight Yoakam), that he must keep his adrenaline in an upper level to stay alive before he can find an antidote. It's generally known that fear, sex and rage make your blood boil and your adrenaline flow. Trying to create as much tension as possible, Chev sets out to wreak his deadly vengeance on those who have betrayed him, and prevent his girlfriend Eve (Amy Smart) from falling into the mob's clutches.
In the small town of Knapely, Yorkshire, England, Annie Clarke (Julie Walters) has just lost her husband, who was ill with leukemia. Inspired in his speech to the local Women's Institute, where he said that "the flowers of Yorkshire are like the women of Yorkshire", and "the last phase of the women of Yorkshire is always the most glorious", her best friend Chris Harper (Helen Mirren) decides to make a calendar with twelve local middle-age women nude to raise funds for the wing of leukemia treatment in the local hospital. The calendar becomes well succeeded, making them famous and affecting their lives.
Set in China, 10th Century, the gripping epic-scale historical drama follows the tragic collapse of the Later Tang dynasty. The imperial court wallows in sin: lust, infidelity, hatred, betrayal, incest, and conspiracy, to name a few. Empress Phoenix (Gong Li) has a liaison with Crown Prince Wan (Liu Ye), her stepson from the Emperor’s first marriage, who maintains a second secret relationship with Jiang Chan (Li Man), the Imperial Doctor’s daughter, and harbours a plan to elope with her. Meanwhile, Emperor Ping (Chow Yun Fat), a man of humble origins and great ambition, doesn’t love his wife, whom he only married to succeed to the throne. He has a nefarious scheme to use a special poison to drive the Empress mad. Moreover, he senses a threat from Prince Jai (Jay Chou), his middle son, and Prince Yu (Qin Junjie), his youngest son, who he thinks may want to take the throne by force or guile. There comes the Chrysanthemum Festival during which the darkest family secrets are revealed.
The plot revolves around four characters. The thief, Albert Spica (Michael Gambon), is a stout man with a broad and thick beard. Brute and boorish, he abuses people, including his aristocratic and reserved wife, Georgina (Helen Mirren). Enslaved and humbled, Georgina enters into a liaison relationship with a gentle bookseller, Michael (Alan Howard). They have intimacy between meals in the kitchen of her husband's restaurant. When Albert gets to know about their affair, he and his men track down Georgina's lover and kill him in his book store. Having found Michael's dead body, Georgina plots her long-awaited vengeance. She brings the body to the restaurant's chef, Richard (Richard Bohringer), and asks him to cook it. She then presents her lover's roasted flesh to her vicious husband and suggests that he take a bite of it. Surrounded by Albert's other victims, the wife shoots him as soon as he cuts a piece of the flesh.
Bernie Lootz (William H. Macy) is a guy who has built his "career" in a casino in Las Vegas as a kind of anti-talisman, a person who professionally frightens away Luck. Wandering among tables, he cools warming beams of gamblers' lucky stars. The reason why Bernie has been doing this for years is his gambling debt he owes to the slippery Director of Operations, Shelly Kaplow (Alec Baldwin), and has to fulfill it this way. A couple of days are now left before Bernie will start his new, debtless life. Who could fo he is destined he meet Natalie (Maria Bello), a new cocktail waitress at the casino, within these days. He is in love, and look what - his bad karma is off and away.
The thought-provoking documentary follows Richard Ogust, a kind-hearted, nature-loving writer who sacrifices his life's work to preserve rare and endangered turtle species from extinction. He spends years sharing his New York City apartment with hundreds of turtles until his population of turtles and tortoises amounts to 1,600. Ogust finds it necessary to relocate the animals to a warehouse in New Jersey. The movie depicts various trials the man goes through for the sake of turtles.
In this tale of friendship, loyalty and sacrifice, Fern Arable (Dakota Fanning) is a young farm girl who rescues the runt of a litter of eleven piglets when her dad (Kevin Anderson) decides to kill him. Fern names the piglet Wilbur (voiced by Dominic Scott Kay), begins to raise him on her own and becomes excessively attached to him. To her regret, after her tiny pet grows into a big pig, he is taken to the farm run by her uncle and aunt, Homer (Gary Basaraba) and Edith Zuckerman (Siobhan Fallon). There, the amiable pig forges an unlikely, but truly remarkable, friendship with Charlotte (voiced by Julia Roberts), a spider that lives in the space above his pen. When Wilbur hears the bad news that he is destined to become Christmas dinner, it's up to Charlotte to save the day. The loyal spider begins spinning messages in her web, hoping to make the farmer realize Wilbur is a special pig that should be spared.
Everyone has a quirk of their own. Brian Stimpson (John Cleese), the headmaster of a British high school, is obsessed with punctuality; therefore his school runs 'like clockwork'. But when the day of his glory approaches, his ordered world starts to unravel. Being elected the chairman of a prestigious educational conference of headmasters, Stimpson sets out upon his journey to the other side of the country. But he unwittingly boards the wrong train and is forced to run a cross country race to be in time for the conference and make the most important presentation in his life. Things only get worse for Stimpson when he ends up wanted by the police for a car theft, shoplifting and vandalism...
During the Vietnam war, a girl is taken from her village by five American soldiers. Four of the soldiers rape her, but the fifth refuses. The young girl is killed. The fifth soldier is determined that justice will be done. The film is more about the realities of war, rather than this single event.
Cookie's Fortune unfolds over an eventful Easter weekend in the small town of Holly Springs, Mississippi. The town residents are peaceful, kind folk--with the exception of Camille Dixon (Glenn Close)--a pushy theatre director with an incredibly shy younger sister, Cora (Julianne Moore), whose estranged daughter Emma (Liv Tyler) has just returned to town. On the heels of her latest play, Camille is shocked to discover that her Aunt Jewel Mae "Cookie" Orcutt (Patricia Neal) has committed suicide. Terrified at the thought of how this will tarnish the family name, she eats the suicide note to make it look like a burglary. This set-up leads the police to one main suspect, Willis Richland (Charles S. Dutton), who also happens to be Cookie's best friend. Although the rest of the town is convinced Willis didn't commit the crime, an outside investigator (Courtney B. Vance) isn't so sure. As Easter Sunday and opening night of the play arrive, the truth comes out, revealing more secrets than anyone could have possibly imagined. Director Altman tells his story at a leisurely pace, beautifully recreating the eccentricities of small town life in this sweet-natured tale.
Michael Newman (Adam Sandler), an architect, is a father of two. He's a workaholic, and being frustrated in his job and an ungrateful boss. Suddenly Michael discovers a universal remote allowing him to control not only his home electronics but entirely his life. In this high-concept fantasy comedy Sandler's hero travels back and forth through the different points of his life. The wonderful device lets him to mute a neighbour's barking dog and to zoom back the details of a past quarrel with wife. Suddenly Michael realizes the huge amount of important things he missed in his life paying to much attention to his work.
After his Vice-president suddenly dies, the President (Jeff Bridges) who is near the end of his final term, decides to leave a legacy by selecting a woman to fill the position. Enter a Senator (Joan Allen), who has shifted from the Republican Party to the Democratic. Initially appearing to be the perfect candidate, an allegation suddenly appears that she had been involved in a sexual orgy as a 19 year old in college. The confirmation committee chairman (Gary Oldman), a Republican, leaks the information to the press, while using the press discussion as a forum to bring it into the hearings. The chairman desires to get a Governor (William Petersen) into the office. The Governor had become a national hero when he attempted to rescue a young woman from a car that crashed from a bridge into deep water near where the Governor had been fishing.
Set in London, England, good Samaritan Dan Wolf (Jude Law), a struggling writer, takes Alice Ayres (Natalie Portman), a shady young woman and part-time stripper, to the hospital when she's hit by a car, and they fall in love. One year later, Dan meets photographer Anna Cameron (Julie Roberts) and tries to pick her up, but she rebuffs him. In revenge, Dan sets Anna up for an embarrassing encounter with sex-addicted dermatologist Larry Bagley (Clive Owen), but the two end up seeing each other. Then another year later, Dan and Anna begin an affair of their own, and relationships between the four collapse. Over the next year, all of them become obsessed with hurting each other and wreak some heavy emotional damage. Will any of them be strong enough to put this destructive sequence of events to a stop?
