From all outward appearances, Pippa Lee (ROBIN WRIGHT PENN) leads a charmed existence. An anchor of feminine serenity, she is the devoted wife of an accomplished publisher (ALAN ARKIN) thirty years her senior, the proud mother of two grown children, and a trusted friend and confidant to all who cross her path. But as Pippa dutifully follows her husband to a new life in a staid Connecticut retirement community, her idyllic world and the persona she has built over the course of her marriage will be put to the ultimate test.
In truth, the gracious woman of the present day has seen more than her fair share of turmoil in her past - an array of erotic misadventures, a diet-pill-addicted mother and the suicide of an exotic rival - until finding love and security in a family of her own. Embarking on a bittersweet journey of self-discovery, along with help from a new, strange and soulful acquaintance (KEANU REEVES), Pippa must now confront both her volatile past and the hidden undercurrents of her seemingly placid world to find the true sense of self which has always eluded her.
Cast: Robin Wright Penn, Alan Arkin, Keanu Reeves, Monica Bellucci, Blake Lively, Maria Bello, Julianne Moore, Winona Ryder
Directed by Rebecca Miller
Script: Rebecca Miller
Producer: Brad Pitt
A sequence of four (in the television version – five) independent stories with their independent characters, forming a coherent narrative. In its form the film is like a theatre performance with a final bow taken by all the participants. Long-forgotten “un-splintered” monologues allow the actors to put on show their acting skills, without hiding them behind special effects and dynamical montage. Unlike anything, this is original dramatic art. The film tries to drive the spectator into frenzy. It is a protest that is vital in an era of total crisis, a cry from the heart which paradoxically gives us hope that this is not yet the end, but only a crack in the system, a liberation from stereotypes, templates and chains.
– Closing film of the Russian Film Festival "Kinotavr", Sochi, 2009.
Cast: Mikhail Efremov, Alexander Strizhenov, Victor Sukhorukov, Evgeni Stychkin,
Pavel Derevianko, Yuri Kolokolnikov,
Directed by Grigori Konstantinopolsky
Script: Grigori Konstantinopolsky
Producer: Grigori Konstantinopolsky, Andrei Novikov
two salesmen who trash a company truck on an energy drink-fueled bender. Upon their arrest, the court gives them a choice: do hard time or spend 150 service hours with a mentorship program. After one day with the kids, however, jail doesn't look half bad.
Surrounded by annoying do-gooders, Danny struggles with his every neurotic impulse to guide Augie (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) through the trials of becoming a man. Unfortunately, the guy just dumped by his girlfriend (Elizabeth Banks) has only sarcasm to offer a bashful 16-year-old obsessed with medieval role play.
Meanwhile, charming Wheeler tries to trade in an addiction to partying and women to assist a fifth-grader named Ronnie (Bobb'e J. Thompson) redirect his foul-mouthed ways. It would probably help if Ronnie's new mentor wasn't an overgrown adolescent whose idea of quality time includes keggers in Venice Beach.
Once the center's ex-con director (Jane Lynch) gives them an ultimatum, Danny and Wheeler are forced to tailor their brand of immature wisdom to their charges. And if they can just make it through probation without getting thrown in jail, the world's worst role models will prove that, sometimes, it takes a village idiot to raise a child.
Starring: Seann William Scott, Paul Rudd, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Jane Lynch, Elizabeth Banks, Nicole Randall Johnson
Directed by: David Wain
Taking Woodstock is the new film from Academy Award-winning director Ang Lee - and it’s a trip! Based on the memoirs of Elliot Tiber, the comedy stars Demetri Martin as Elliot, who inadvertently played a role in making 1969’s Woodstock Music and Arts Festival into the famed happening it was. Featuring a standout ensemble cast, and songs from a score of ’60s musical icons Taking Woodstock is a joyous voyage to a moment in time when everything seemed possible.
Working as an interior designer in Greenwich Village, Elliot is still staked to the family business - a dumpy Catskills motel called the El Monaco that is being run into the ground by his overbearing parents. In the summer of 1969, Elliot has to move back upstate to the El Monaco in order to help save the motel from being taken over by the bank.
Upon hearing that a planned music and arts festival has lost its permit from the neighboring town of Wallkill, NY, Elliot calls producer Michael Lang (Jonathan Groff) at Woodstock Ventures to offer his family’s motel to the promoters and generate some much-needed business. Elliot also introduces Lang to his neighbor Max Yasgur (Eugene Levy), who operates a 600-acre dairy farm down the road.
Soon the Woodstock staff is moving into the El Monaco - and half a million people are on their way to Yasgur’s farm for “3 days of Peace & Music in White Lake.” With a little help from his friends and with a little opposition from townspeople Elliot finds himself swept up in a generation-defining experience that would change his life - and popular culture - forever.
Cast: Demetri Martin, Dan Fogler, Henry Goodman, Jonathan Groff, Eugene Levy, Emile Hirsch, Liev Schreiber
Directed by Ang Lee
Script: James Schamus, Elliot Tiber, Tom Monte
Producer: Ang Lee, James Schamus
Tokyo is a city of transitions in three short films. A young woman who finds her life useless experiences a metamorphosis. A disheveled Caucasian emerges from a manhole to face arrest, trial, and execution; he calls himself "Merde" and speaks a language only his look-alike attorney understands. Is he human? A recluse experiences human contact when a pizza-delivery girl faints at his door during an earthquake. He conquers fear to seek her out. A chair, a corpse, a hermit: sources of urban connection?
Cast: Yû Aoi, YosiYosi Arakawa, Jean-François Balmer, Julie Dreyfus, Ayako Fujitani, Ayumi Ito, Teruyuki Kagawa, Denis Lavant, Yutaka Matsushige, Nao Omori, Satoshi Tsumabuki, Hiroshi Yamamoto
Directed by Michel Gondry ("Interior Design"), Joon-ho Bong ("Shaking Tokyo"), Leos Carax ("Merde")
Script by Michel Gondry ("Interior Design"), Joon-ho Bong ("Shaking Tokyo"), Leos Carax ("Merde")
Producer: Anne Pernod-Sawada, Masa Sawada, Michiko Yoshitake
Jim Carrey stars as Carl Allen, a man who signs up for a self-help program based on one simple principle: say yes to everything...and anything. At first, unleashing the power of "yes" transforms Carl's life in amazing and unexpected ways, but he soon discovers that opening up his life to endless possibilities can have its drawbacks.
Director: Peyton Reed
Cast: Jim Carrey, Zooey Deschanel, Bradley Cooper, Rhys Darby, John Michael Higgins, Danny Masterson, Terence Stamp, Rocky Carroll
Octave is the master of the universe.
Octave exercises the profession of copywriter. Today he decides what you will want tomorrow. For him, "man is a product like everything else." Octave works for the world's largest advertising agency, Ross & Witchcraft, nicknamed "The Ross."
He's swimming in money, girls and coke. Even so, he has his doubts. Two events will turn Octave's life on its head: his love affair with Sophie, the agency's most beautiful employee, and a meeting at Madone to sell an advertisement to this major company in the diary sector. Gifted Octave loses the plot and decides to rebel against the system that created him, by botching his greatest publicity campaign.
From Paris, where agency bosses negociate deals, to Miami, where advertisements get shot while gulping anti-depressants, from Saint-Germain-de-Pres to an isolated island in Central America, will Octave manage to escape his golden prison?
Cast: Jean Dujardin, Jocelyn Quivrin, Patrick Mille, Vahina Giocante, Élisa Tovati, Dominique Bettenfeld, Nicolas Marie, Antoine Basler
Directed by Jan Kounen
Andrey is a Moscow yuppie working as a creative manager in a large advertising agency. That day he smokes out an entire pack of cigarettes. With each cigarette the storm of events and conflicts Andrey is involved in becomes more and more violent. Confronted to a situation in which his professional and personal future is jeopardized, Andrey must make the one and only right decision.
Script writer Dmitry Sobolev: "Taking sides, making your choice in the world where everyone strives to achieve success. It is absolutely true about Moscow. In other areas of Russia changes haven't been so drastic. The way of life has remained the same. In Moscow success makes you. As a matter of fact I attempted to reveal that success was not all in life. The most important is the decisive choice. God has endowed us with the ability to choose and has given us the opportunity to make the choice. Success is not of vital importance, there is something else that counts. No use shrinking from taking sides. No one knows with whom the correct choice lies. The movie has no ready answer; it poses the question and leaves it unanswered. No answer is available; it can't be supplied either by philosophy or by any kind of art".
The comedy takes place in an Absurdistanian village. In this land, men are lazy and their only effort consists of getting to the pub and inventing an excuse to avoid making love with their wives. When a water supply crisis arises, the men do not do anything to improve the situation. The ony hope is Temelko
Cast: Kristyna Malerova, Maximillian Mauff, Dace Bonate
Directed by Veit Helmer
Scriptwriter: Veit Helmer, Zaza Buadze, Gordan Mihic
Producer: Veit Helmer
Burn After Reading, is a new comedy thriller from Academy Award winners, Joel Coen and Ethan Coen (No Country for Old Men, Fargo, The Big Lebowski).
At the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency in Arlington, Virginia, analyst Osborne Cox (John Malkovich) arrives for a top-secret meeting. Unfortunately for Cox, the secret is soon out: he is being ousted. Cox does not take the news particularly well and returns to his Georgetown home to work on his memoirs and his drinking, not necessarily in that order. His wife Katie (Tilda Swinton) is dismayed, though not particularly surprised; she is already well into an illicit affair with Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney), a married federal marshal, and sets about making plans to leave Cox for Harry.
Elsewhere in the Washington, D.C. suburbs, and seemingly worlds apart, Hardbodies Fitness Centers employee Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) can barely concentrate on her work. She is consumed with her life plan for extensive cosmetic surgery, and confides her mission to can-do colleague Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt). Linda is all but oblivious to the fact that the gym's manager Ted Treffon (Richard Jenkins) pines for her even as she arranges dates via the Internet with other men.
When a computer disc containing material for the CIA analyst's memoirs accidentally falls into the hands of Linda and Chad, the duo are intent on exploiting their find. As Ted frets, "No good can come of this," events spiral out of everyone's and anyone's control, in a cascading series of darkly hilarious encounters.
Cast: Brad Pitt, George Clooney, John Malkovich, Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand
Directed by: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen
Script: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen
Set in contemporary London, 'Cassandra's Dream' is a powerful and thrilling story about two brothers (Ewan McGregor, Colin Farrell) who are desperate to better their troubled lives. One is a chronic gambler in debt over his head, and the other is a young man in love with a beautiful actress (newcomer Hayley Atwell) he has recently met. Their lives gradually become entangled into a sinister situation with intense and unfortunate results.
Cast: Ewan McGregor, Colin Farrell, Peter-Hugo Daly, John Benfield, Ashley Madekwe, Hayley Atwell, Tom Wilkinson
Directed by Woody Allen
Based on George Crile's book about the CIA's largest and most successful covert CIA operation, the arming of the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan. The covert ops were engineered by Charlie Wilson (Hanks), a charismatic, wheeler-dealer, liberal Texas congressman who teamed with a rogue CIA operative (Hoffman). The two manipulated Congress, the CIA and a host of foreign governments in order to assist the Afghan rebels in their fight against the Soviets in the 1980s. Many of the men armed by the CIA went on to become the Taliban's enforcers and Osama bin Laden's protectors.
Cast: Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, Om Puri, Jud Tylor, Nazanin Boniadi
Directed by Mike Nichols