5 Star Films

Director: Jaume Balagueró, Paco Plaza

Writer: Jaume Balagueró, Luis Berdejo

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Summary: [Rec] revolves around a television reporter, Ángela, and her cameraman, Pablo, who cover the night shift in one of Barcelona's local fire stations. The firehouse receives a call from an old lady trapped in her house. When they arrive, and the firemen and the police break down the door, the old lady suddenly attacks and bites one of the policemen, and it is revealed that an unknown but virulent disease is infecting people, causing them to turn in to infected cannibals. The police and military quarantines the building and the camera crew is trapped inside, constantly recording the mayhem that ensues.[

Director: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

Writer: Guillermo Arriaga

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Summary: This is the story of three gentle persons: Paul Rivers (Penn) an ailing mathematician lovelessly married to an English emigré (Gainsbourg), Christina Peck, an upper-middle-class suburban housewife, happily married and mother of two little girls, and Jack Jordan (Del Toro), an ex-convict who has found in his Christian faith the strength to raise a family. They will be brought together by a terrible accident that will change their lives. By the final frame, none of them will be the same as they will learn harsh truths about love, faith, courage, desire and guilt, and how chance can change our worlds irretrievably, forever.

Director: Judd Apatow

Writer: Judd Apatow, Steve Carell

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Summary: Andy at the age of 40 still hasn't had sex. He lets his secret slip at a poker game with his buds from work. After the revealing all his friends are on a mission to help get him laid. Along the way Andy meets a nice mom: Trish who fall head over heels for each other.

Director: Ki-duk Kim

Writer: Ki-duk Kim

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Summary: Romances end in blood and the frail hopes of individuals are torn apart in a vile karmic continuity of colonialism, civil war and occupation. After surviving Japanese colonization, Korea became the first war zone of the Cold War. The legacy of war remains today in this divided country. Three forlorn teenagers, Chank-guk, Jihum and Eunok are figures in the landscape of this story, which highlights the global implications of a very Korean reality. None of them is able to escape the withering pull of tragedy. All desperate pleas for love and redemption are returned stamped in red with blood.

Director:

Writer: George Casey, Mose Richards

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Summary: The Serengeti is a huge area of grassland in Tanzania, Africa. Once a year, in the time of drought, about two million herd animals like antelopes travel north to feed and mate before moving south again, when plants there begin to blossom.

James Earl Jones narrates this award-winning IMAX film that explores the natural beauty and timeless cycles of Africa's Serengeti plains. The highlight is a spectacle that few humans have witnessed--the great migration--during which 2 million wildebeests, zebras and antelope travel over 500 miles across the plains.

Director: Alan J. Pakula

Writer: Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward, William Goldman

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Summary: In the run-up to the 1972 elections, Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward covers what seems to be a minor break-in at the Democratic Party National headquarters. He is surprised to find top lawyers already on the defence case, and the discovery of names and addresses of Republican fund organisers on the accused further arouses his suspicions. The editor of the Post is prepared to run with the story and assigns Woodward and Carl Bernstein to it. They find the trail leading higher and higher in the Republican Party, and eventually into the White House itself.

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Writer: Joseph Conrad, John Milius, Francis Ford Coppola, Michael Herr

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Summary: Based on Joseph Conrad's Heart Of Darkness, this is a controversial addition to the multitude of Vietnam war movies in existence. Set in 1969 Vietnam, we follow U.S. Special Forces Captain Willard on his mission up a river into Cambodia to assassinate a renegade Green Beret who has set himself up as a God among a local tribe.

Director: Takashi Miike

Writer: Robert Farrar, Robert Farrar

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Summary: Seven years after the death of his wife, company executive Aoyama is invited to sit in on auditions for an actress. Leafing through the resumés in advance, his eye is caught by Yamazaki Asami, a striking young woman with ballet training. On the day of the audition, she's the last person they see. Aoyama is hooked. He notes her number from her file, calls her and takes her to dinner. He hesitates to call again, worried that he'll seem too eager. When he does, Asami knowingly lets the phone ring for some time before answering. She's alone in her darkened room - alone, that is, apart from the writhing victim she has tied up in a sack on the floor...

Director: Fabián Bielinsky

Writer: Fabián Bielinsky

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Summary: A quiet, cynic taxidermist, who suffers epilepsy attacks, is obsessed with committing the perfect crime. He claims that the cops are too stupid to find out about it when it's well executed, and that the robbers are too stupid to execute it the right way; and that he could do it himself relying on his photographic memory and his strategic planning skills. After he is invited on a hunting trip away from his home, an accident gives him the chance of his life: the possibility to commit the perfect crime he has been waiting for.

Director: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

Writer: Guillermo Arriaga, Guillermo Arriaga

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Summary: 4 interlocking stories all connected by a single gun all converge at the end and reveal a complex and tragic story of the lives of humanity around the world and how we truly aren't all that different. In Morocco, a troubled married couple are on vacation trying to work out their differences. Meanwhile, a Moroccan herder buys a rifle for his sons so they can keep the jackals away from his herd. A girl in Japan dealing with rejection, the death of her mother, the emotional distance of her father, her own self-consciousness, and a disability among many other issues, deals with modern life in the enormous metropolis of Tokyo, Japan. Then, on the opposite side of the world the married couple's Mexican nanny takes the couple's 2 children with her to her son's wedding in Mexico, only to come into trouble on the return trip. Combined, it provides a powerful story and an equally powerful looking glass into the lives of seemingly random people around the world and it shows just how connected we really are.

Director: Kinji Fukasaku

Writer: Koushun Takami, Kenta Fukasaku

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Summary: Forty-two delinquent students, three days, one deserted Island: welcome to Battle Royale. A group of delinquent students from a Japanese high school have been forced by legislation to compete in a new forum of reality television.The students are each given a bag with a randomly selected weapon and a few rations of food and water and sent off to kill each other in a no-holds-barred (with a few minor rules) game to the death, which means that the students have three days to kill each other until one survives--or they all die. The movie focus on a few of the students and how they cope. Some decide to play the game like the psychotic Kiriyama or the sexual Mistuko, while others like the heroes of the movie--Shuya, Noriko, and Kawada--are trying to find a way to get off the Island without violence. However, as the numbers dwell down lower and lower on an hourly basis, is there any way for Shuya and classmates to survive?

Director: Alejandro Gomez Monteverde

Writer: Alejandro Gomez Monteverde, Patrick Million

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Summary: An international soccer star is on his way to sign a multi-million dollar contract when a series of events unfold that bring his career to an abrupt end. A beautiful waitress, struggling to make it in New York City, discovers something about herself that she's unprepared for. In one irreversible moment, their lives are turned upside down... until a simple gesture of kindness brings them both together, turning an ordinary day to an unforgettable experience.

Director: Joel Coen

Writer: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen

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Summary: When "The Dude" Lebowski is mistaken for a millionaire Lebowski, two thugs urinate on his rug to coerce him into paying a debt he knows nothing about. While attempting to gain recompense for the ruined rug from his wealthy counterpart, he accepts a one-time job with high pay-off. He enlists the help of his bowling buddy, Walter, a gun-toting Jewish-convert with anger issues. Deception leads to more trouble, and it soon seems that everyone from porn empire tycoons to nihilists want something from The Dude.

Director: Yang Li

Writer: Yang Li

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Summary: Blind Mountain follows young woman, Bai Xuemei, in the early 1990s who recently graduated from college and attempts to find work to help pay for her brother's education. In the process, she is drugged, kidnapped and sold as a bride to a villager in the Qinling Mountains of China's Shaanxi province. Trapped in the fiercely traditional town, the young woman finds that her avenues of escape are all blocked. As she searches for allies, including a young boy, a school teacher and a mailman, she suffers from being raped by her "husband" and continued beatings at the hands of the villagers, her husband, and her husbands' parents.

Like Li's previous film, Blind Shaft, which dealt with the notoriously dangerous mining industry, Blind Mountain turns a sharply critical eye towards another one of China's continuing social problems, this time the illegal sex slave trade.

Director: Chin-yen Yee

Writer: Chin-yen Yee

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Summary: An is-she-or-isn't-she gay comedy focused on a Taiwanese teen, the boy she might like, and the girl she may love.
Plot Synopsis:

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson

Writer: Paul Thomas Anderson

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Summary: Even if the notorious 1970s porn-filmmaking milieu doesn't exactly turn you on, don't let it turn you off to this movie's extraordinary virtues, either. Boogie Nights is one of the key movies of the 1990s, and among the most ambitious and exuberantly alive American movies in years. It's also the breakthrough for an amazing new director, whose dazzling kaleidoscopic style here recalls the Robert Altman of Nashville and the Martin Scorsese of GoodFellas. Although loosely based on the sleazy life and times of real-life porn legend John Holmes, at heart it's a classic Hollywood rise-and-fall fable: a naive, good-looking young busboy is discovered in a San Fernando Valley disco by a famous motion picture producer, becomes a hotshot movie star, lives the high life, and then loses everything when he gets too big for his britches, succumbs to insobriety, and is left behind by new times and new technology. Of course, it ain't exactly A Star Is Born or Singin' in the Rain. Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson (in only his second feature!) puts his own affectionately sardonic twist on the old showbiz biopic formula: the ambitious upstart changes his name and achieves stardom in porno films as "Dirk Diggler." Instead of drinking to excess, he snorts cocaine (the classic drug of '70s hedonism); and it's the coming of home video (rather than talkies) that helps to dash his big-screen dreams. As for the britches ... well, the controversial "money shot" explains everything. And the cast is one of the great ensembles of the '90s, including Oscar nominees Burt Reynolds and Julianne Moore, Mark Wahlberg (who really can act--from the waist up, too!), Heather Graham (as Rollergirl), William H. Macy, John C. Reilly, and Ricky Jay. --Jim Emerson

Director: Hong-jin Na

Writer: Won-Chan Hong, Shinho Lee

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Summary: Joong-ho is a dirty detective turned pimp in financial trouble as several of his girls have recently disappeared without clearing their debts. While trying to track them down, he finds a clue that the vanished girls were all called up by a same client whom one of his girls is meeting with right now.

Director:

Writer: Owen Newman and Amanda Barrett

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Summary: This 14-year retrospective of the work of Owen Newman and Amanda Barrett features the two filmmakers talking about how they managed to capture never-before-seen footage of big cats, including some that had been written off as impossible to film. To these two filmmakers, "impossible" was just a challenge to overcome. Driving into the night, armed with night goggles, infrared lights and cameras, they were the first to film leopards at night, uncovering a whole array of behavior that was new to science and filmmakers alike.

Two other cats, servals and caracals, only glimpsed in passing by other filmmakers, became newly discovered stars of their own films. With captivating stories and characters, Newman and Barrett were able to transform lions from big cats everyone thought they knew into individuals with personalities, griefs, and grudges.

Director: Kátia Lund Fernando Meirelles

Writer: Paulo Lins, Bráulio Mantovani

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Summary: Like cinematic dynamite, City of God lights a fuse under its squalid Brazilian ghetto, and we're a captive audience to its violent explosion. The titular favela is home to a seething army of impoverished children who grow, over the film's ambitious 20-year timeframe, into cutthroat killers, drug lords, and feral survivors. In the vortex of this maelstrom is L'il Z (Leandro Firmino da Hora--like most of the cast, a nonprofessional actor), self-appointed king of the dealers, determined to eliminate all competition at the expense of his corrupted soul. With enough visual vitality and provocative substance to spark heated debate (and box-office gold) in Brazil, codirectors Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund tackle their subject head on, creating a portrait of youthful anarchy so appalling--and so authentically immediate--that City of God prompted reforms in socioeconomic policy. It's a bracing feat of stylistic audacity, borrowing from a dozen other films to form its own unique identity. You'll flinch, but you can't look away. --Jeff Shannon

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Writer: Francis Ford Coppola

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Summary: After the success of the first Godfather picture, Francis Ford Coppola could do anything he wanted. He chose a very loose adaptation from the leading character and basic scenario of Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-up, to create this both exciting and provocative thriller about a surveillance specialist who finds himself involved in a murder plot.



In Blow-up, a fashion photographer takes a picture in the park and comes to believe that he may have evidence of a murder. The difficulty is that the visual evidence is not conclusive -- it demands interpretation and no amount of manipulation can overcome the ambiguity of the image. Here, Harry Caul uses elaborate techniques to record and collect fragments from what seems to be an innocuous conversation, but that he begins to suspect will be used in a murder plot.



Just as Blow-up became not only a film about a photographer and a murderer but also a meditation on vision and on the cinema -- so The Conversation is a rich and sophisticated film about the nature of sound and the interpretation of sound and in particular about the way in which sound is captured for film. Apart from having an excellent jazz soundtrack, the film is very subtle in its sound editing.



It opens on a crowded park, and we immediately become aware that the sound of the crowds and the music and the individual people and the cars is recorded sound. We hear the subtle distortions that come from blowing up sound recorded from a distance, and that in a finished soundtrack would be removed. It turns out we are both watching the crowd and watching and listening in as a couple in the crowd is being recorded through a number of highly specialized surveillance techniques. Later in the film, we are reminded at several points and in several ways that the sound in a film is an artificial construction and that it is independent of the visuals. Some scenes that initially seem like they are part of the normal exegesis of the film, turn out to be reconstructions based on how certain characters heard and interpreted recorded sound; in other scenes the aural artifacts we have become familiar with show up to indicate that we can never be sure whether the sound is just part of the film or whether it is being recorded by a third party.



This is an excellent film on a number of levels, as a political thriller, as a portrait of a paranoid individual, but also as a meditation on the nature of sound in film. Definitely one to watch ... and listen to.

Director: Gisela Kaufmann

Writer: Gisela Kaufmann

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Summary: Call it a case of mistaken identity. When it comes to camouflage, chameleons get all the attention. But the often-overlooked cuttlefish is the real master of disguise. Cousins of the squid and octopus, cuttlefish are among the most unusual animals on our planet. With stunning underwater footage and in-depth expert interviews, NOVA gets up close and personal with this astonishing brainy bunch.

Director: Gisela Kaufmann

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Summary: Imagine an alien with three hearts and ten arms growing out of its head. This intriguing special reveals the spectacular pyrotechnics of cuttlefish, discovering what goes on between their eyes and what can they teach us about our own brainpower.

This alien actually exists. Cuttlefish are the one of the strangest animals on our planet. Leading expert Dr. Mark Norman reveals how these shape-shifting champions can hypnotize their prey, impersonate the other sex and even turn out to be deadly. And they share something with us: brainpower. Cuttlefish have the largest brain to body ratio of all invertebrates. But does this mean they are intelligent? Can they learn and remember complex new tricks? Cuttlefish – the Brainy Bunch brings to the surface the spectacular pyrotechnics of these clever creatures, discovering just what goes on between their eyes and what they can teach us about our own wits.

Cuttlefish might seem a better subject for Jamie's Kitchen - brushed with five-spice and served with a mango and coconut salad - than for a wildlife documentary, but the first few minutes of Cuttlefish: The Brainy Bunch quickly establish how fascinating the beasts can be, even if they haven't been brushed with five spice and served up with a mango and coconut salad.

Cuttlefish, we're told, are masters of disguise and, just like that, we see them underwater, changing colours and shape to blend in with surrounding coral and rocks. They are also relatively intelligent: their doughnut-shaped brains are proportionately the largest of the invertebrates and they are able to learn and remember tasks.

Director: Adam Brooks

Writer: Adam Brooks

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Summary: Romantic comedy: Will Hayes, a 30-something Manhattan dad is in the midst of a divorce when his 10 year old daughter, Maya, starts to question him about his life before marriage. Maya wants to know absolutely everything about how her parents met and fell in love. Will's story begins in 1992, as a young, starry-eyed aspiring politician who moves to New York from Wisconsin in order to work on the Clinton campaign. For Maya, Will relives his past as a idealistic young man learning the ins and outs of big city politics, and recounts the history of his romantic relationships with three very different women. On the campaign, Will's best buddy is Russell McCormack. They not only have similar political aspirations, they share the same type of girl problems, too. Will hopelessly attempts a "PG" version of his story for his daughter ad changes the names so Maya has to guess who he finally married. Is her mother Will's college sweetheart, the dependable girl next-door Emily? Is she his longtime best friend and confidante, he apolitical April? Or is she the free-spirited but ambitious journalist? As Maya puts together the pieces of her dad's romantic puzzle, she begins to understand that love is not so simple or easy. And as Will tells her his tale, Maya helps him to understand that it's definitely never too late to go back...and maybe even possible to find a happy ending.

Director: Martin Scorsese

Writer: William Monahan, Siu Fai Mak

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Summary: Two just-graduated officers from Massachusetts State Police Academy follow opposite sides of the law: William Costigan is assigned to work undercover with the Irish mobster Frank Costello to get evidences to arrest him. His true identity is only known by his superiors Dignam and Oliver Queenan. The protégée of Costello, Colin Sullivan, is promoted in the Massachusetts State Police and is the informer of Costello. Each police officer gives his best effort trying to disclose the identity of the other "rat".