Genres: Drama | Family | Romance

Actors: Daniel Radcliffe, Teresa Palmer, Christian Byers, Lee Cormie, James Fraser, Jack Thompson, Kris McQuade, Suzie Wilks, Victoria Hill, Sullivan Stapleton,
Ralph Cotterill, Frank Gallacher

Director: Rod Hardy

Country: Australia , UK , USA

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Set in Australia in the 1960s, the touching drama tells the story of Maps (Daniel Radcliffe), Sparks (Christian Byers), Spit (James Fraser) and Misty (Lee Cormie), four close friends who were all born in December. They live in a Catholic convent and look forward to being adopted. Years pass, the boys grow older, and they come to realize that their dreams may never come true.

But on a summer holiday at the seaside the orphans are given hope of ever gaining a real family. The boys make friends with a young couple, Teresa (Victoria Hill) and Fearless (Sullivan Stapleton), who are unable to have kids and ready to adopt one of the orphans. While Maps experiences his first love, the other boys put their friendship to the test by competing for adoption.

Genres: Drama | History | Mystery

Actors: Morgan Freeman, Nigel Hawthorne, Anthony Hopkins, Djimon Hounsou, Matthew McConaughey, David Paymer, Pete Postlethwaite, Stellan Skarsgård, Razaaq Adoti, Abu Bakaar Fofanah, Anna Paquin, Tomas Milian, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Derrick N. Ashong, Geno Silva

Director: Steven Spielberg

Country: USA

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"Amistad" is about a 1839 mutiny onboard a slave ship that is traveling towards the Northeast Coast of America. Much of the story involves a court-room drama about the slave who led the revolt.

As the ship is crossing the Atlantic, Cinque, who was a tribal leader in Africa, leads a mutiny and takes over the ship. They continue to sail, hoping to find help when they land. Instead, when they reach the United States, they are imprisoned as runaway slaves.

They don’t speak a word of English, and it seems like they are doomed to die for killing their captors when an abolitionist lawyer decides to take their case, arguing that they were free citizens of another country and not slaves at all. The case finally gets to the Supreme Court, where John Quincy Adams makes an impassioned and eloquent plea for their release.

Another Steven Spielberg cinematic triumph, Amistad garnered four Academy Award nominations – among them, Best Music Original Dramatic Score (John Williams) and Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Anthony Hopkins).

Cinque (Djimon Hounsou), the central character of the film, is lured from the safety of his African village, trapped like a wild animal, and placed in bondage aboard a large slave trading vessel bound for the Caribbean. Chained to the floor and crammed side-by-side in the hull of the galleon, hundreds and hundreds of kidnapped Africans endure brutal and barbaric treatment. They are rarely fed (and very little when food is given), and each must use the bathroom where he sits, vomit where he sits, and some even die while chained to others. The conditions are best described as a literal hell on earth.

These opening scenes, just like Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, are the most vivid and powerful of the entire movie, conjuring an abundance of images certain to brand themselves in your mind forever. In one such scene, around fifteen to twenty African captives are shackled together and bound by a series of chains when one is thrown overboard. This barbarous act results in a chain reaction that drags each of the connected persons to the bottom of the sea.

But the men and women of Amistad don’t submit easily. One of them decides to fight back. Late one night, the opportunity for revolt presents itself and Cinque sparks an uprising against the ship’s crew. He and his fellow countrymen take the ship by force and kill their captors. Now free from bondage, the men attempt to sail home to their native land, but in the darkness of night, they inadvertently sail to America instead.

The grounded ship gains national political interest when the survivors of the Amistad are treated as slaves. Even President Van Buren (Nigel Hawthorne) takes an interest in the matter. When a young and idealistic lawyer named Baldwin (Matthew McConaughey) and a freedman named Joadson (Morgan Freeman) take up the task of representing Cinque’s interests in an American courtroom, the case takes on a life of its own. Cinque reveals the tale of his capture, details of the island sorting facility where future American slaves are processed, and the general torture and mistreatment of human beings in the pursuit of monetary profit. When the case goes before the Supreme Court, former President John Quincy Adams (Anthony Hopkins) enters the picture in an attempt to win a victory for freedom and individual rights…

One of the more dramatic and important films, Amistad opens your eyes to past injustice and provides a general sense of gratitude for the times in which we live. It will make you angry at the horrible practices of preceding generations. But more importantly, Amistad serves as a reminder to both current and future generations that freedom is not to be taken for granted. It is the birthright of all men, and it is our obligation to fight for it whenever we can. This important message, and its historical lessons, make Amistad one movie no American can afford to miss…

Genres: Drama | Romance

Actors: Romola Garai, Charlotte Rampling, Lucy Russell, Michael Fassbender, Sam Neill, Jacqueline Tong, Janine Duvitski, Christopher Benjamin, Jemma Powell, Simon Woods, Alison Pargeter, Seymour Matthews, Tom Georgeson, Una Stubbs, Rosanna Lavelle

Directors: François Ozon

Country: UK, Belgium, France

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Plot Summary: Based on the book by Elizabeth Taylor, "Angel", this is the story of a young woman with incredible imagination who refuses to accept the world around her, and creates her own realities.

François Ozon continues to flirt with literature, melodrama and comedy camp in Angel, which is the closing film here at the Berlin Film Festival. The first full English-language project from the French director is based on the 1957 Elizabeth Taylor novel, which recounts the rise and fall of the titular penny novelist in early 20th century Britain. Like Almodóvar’s La mala educación (Bad Education), Angel is the fullest expression of the director’s obsessions, combining the high camp of 8 femmes (8 Women) with moments of pure melodrama while continuing to explore the intersecting realms of real life and fantasy that were also an important part of Swimming Pool and Sous le Sable (Under the Sand) — as well as Bad Education. What kind of audience would accept Angel on its own terms is hard to say, though an intimate knowledge of Ozon’s previous work would certainly be helpful.

In Ozon’s previous film Le temps qui reste (Time to Leave), which is as austere as Angel is extravagant, a terminal illness forces a young man to face his own mortality, which makes him decide not to tell anyone about his condition but his aging grandmother. In Angel, a successful young novelist is exactly his opposite: she would not dream of not telling anyone anything. Her work is writing romances and her own life is a fairytale that is constantly being rewritten for the press, her friends and even herself. Every dramatic event becomes a lot more bearable when one realises it is all just another plot twist that will lead to the inevitable happy ending. (Only then, life might have another plot twist up its sleeve, as in this film’s teasing coda.

Angel Deverell (Romola Garai, acting her socks off) grows up in a house above her mother’s modest grocery shop in Norley. She dreams of becoming a famous writer and her wish is fulfilled when a publisher (Sam Neill) decides to publish one of her romance manuscripts, much to the dissatisfaction of his icy wife (Ozon regular Charlotte Rampling, who played the writer in Swimming Pool), who sees in Angel an uneducated brat with only mediocre talent (when asked who her favourite writer is, she says: "I don’t have much time to read. I quite like Shakespeare, except when he tries to be funny").

Like 8 femmes, a Technicolor musical riff on the Agatha Christie murder mystery, Angel starts outside in the snow and pays careful attention to sets (by Katia Wyszkop), costumes (Pascaline Chavanne), music (Philippe Rombi) and cinematography (Denis Lenoir), underlining the Gesamtkunstwerk approach of Ozon when working on a large canvas. Like another rousing cinematic Gesamtkunstwerk, Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge!, it revels in its penny novel plot and uses it as an excuse for a design that seeks to be on par with the oversized emotions of the story, bothering less with historical accuracy than with emotional truth. Indeed, many of Angel’s dresses, to name but one aspect, look like something the girls from Priscilla, Queen of the Desert would be proud to wear to a costumed ball.

Both 8 femmes and Angel pay obvious homage to Technicolor studio films and especially Douglas Sirk’s brand of constructed melodramas, ostentatious back projection and all. Angel is nevertheless a distinct creature that also includes honest moments of pure melodrama that hark back to the seriousness of 1930s and 1940s studio pictures. Quite miraculously, they enhance the drama rather than detract from its more than occasional tone of period piece pastiche. The explanation of their peaceful coexistence lies in the fact that Angel, like Ozon, is a storyteller by profession, and you can feel the joy of both in being swept up in the events of their own creation, in Angel’s case to the extent of believing that her life will follow the pattern established by her romances, which makes her a tragic and deeply flawed character that becomes compelling even as the film keeps reminding us she is but a construction herself (of Taylor and, of course, Ozon and Garai).

Angel’s undying love for Esmé (Michael Fassbinder), the brother of her admiring acquaintance-cum-secretary (Lucy Russell) is the stuff romances are made of, though she derives her rules for their romance from the airy, pink-covered confections she writes but he plays by the rules of the dark, expressionist kind of stories that resemble his paintings. The film’s tonal shifts may be more than an audience expecting a straightforward period piece can handle, and like a good old British novel originally published in instalments in a newspaper, the story is stretched over decidedly more episodes than necessary (something that also plagued 8 femmes). Ozon lovers and adventurous filmgoers, however, should definitely try to catch Angel on the big screen.

Genres: Adventure | Drama

Actors: Casey Affleck | Matt Damon

Directors: Gus Van Sant

Plot: A friendship between two twenty-something men is tested to its very limits when they go on a hike in a desert and forget to bring any water or food with them.

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The plot, such as it is, concerns two friends (played by co-writers Matt Damon and Casey Affleck). After a brief, half-hearted search for what they call "the thing," the guys become lost in a desert (the film was shot in Argentina, Death Valley, and Utah’s salt flats). Each calls the other "Gerry," and each uses the term "gerry" to denote a fuck up (as in, "I thought maybe you’d gerried the rendezvous"). Their friendship is assumed, as if they’ve known one another so long that they needn’t finish sentences or even really start them. They understand one another.

But they also don’t. Too similar and too isolated, they drift together and apart, attuned and detached in time. This is the story of two boys, each caught in his own stoic resistance, his own hostile universe. Gerry traces their gradual, necessary coming to terms with what they can never know, and what they must (Cynthia Fuchs).