Summary:

Three childhood friends, now adult neighbors who have drifted apart, are brought together through the brutal murder of Jimmy's 19-year-old daughter. Sean Penn plays the grieving father; Kevin Bacon plays Sean, the plainclothes cop on the case; and Tim Robbins is Dave, a man deeply troubled following his childhood abduction and sexual abuse by two strange men. It's an important part of this film that the action takes place in a tough white working-class neighborhood north of Boston in a culture that seems to have no place for emotional problems like Dave's.

This leaves Dave alone with his agonies, feeling alienated from himself and living a kind of Jekyll-and-Hyde existence driven by a love-hate relationship with pederasty. One night he kills a child abuser, and then tells contradictory stories to explain the bloodstains he returns home with. Through a tragic misunderstanding, these things are connected with the death of Jimmy's daughter, and Jimmy turns violent and takes justice into his own hands. Shortly after, Sean finds the true killers, who confess.

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Set in Sweden in the late 1950’s, around the time of Ingemar Johansson’s world heavyweight boxing championship, "My Life as a Dog" tells the involving story of a precocious boy, Ingemar (Anton Glanzelius), who gets into trouble, entertains his mother (Anki Lidén) with his antics and plays with his dog, Sickan. As his mother becomes increasingly sick with a terminal illness (almost certainly tuberculosis), he is sent to live with relations for the summer in a small rural community. After an eventful vacation, he returns to his mother but she soon dies. He stays with family friends who, unable to cope with him or his behavior, send him back to his relations, where he is again welcomed, but somewhat less enthusiastically.

Throughout this, Ingemar maintains his sense of perspective by comparing his own situation to the tragedies he reads in the newspaper. In particular, he returns to the story of Laika, the Russian dog launched into space. Laika was sent into orbit in a capsule with no expectation that she would return, and it was believed that she eventually starved to death or ran out of oxygen (although recent reports, decades after Laika’s death and several years after the film was made, have acknowledged that she probably died within a few hours of launching from overheating and stress).

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In this film based on a true story, Ramón Sampedro (Javier Barden), a young fisherman from the northwest coast of Spain, is injured in a diving accident that leaves him paralyzed from the neck down and completely dependent for his care on his older brother and his sister-in-law, who make numerous sacrifices in order to care for him. Twenty-seven years later, in his 50's, Ramón is weary of his life, which he feels is without dignity, and he tries to get legal permission to end it.

His brother is adamantly opposed to euthanasia, but Ramón is comforted and aided in his quest by two women who are drawn into his circle. Julia (Bélen Rueda), a lawyer suffering from a degenerative disease, begins to design a legal case for Ramón but soon falls in love with him (although she seems happily married), and he with her. In a particularly moving scene, Ramón-who of course cannot move--tells Julia that her smell is the beginning of his erotic fantasies about her.

Julia helps him edit and publish a book of his poetry, but then, having agreed to a joint suicide, she mysteriously backs out. Rosa (Lola Dueñas), a young single mother who works in a fish-packing factory and who has had a hard life, also falls in love with Ramón. For some time she tries to change his mind, arguing that his example has inspired her and saved her from a life of despair. Ramón challenges her: "The person who truly loves me will be the one who helps me [commit suicide]."

When Ramón's legal appeal (for the same rights the nondisabled have to end their lives) is lost on a technicality, he seems to have nowhere to turn, but Rosa, converted by her love for Ramón, finally agrees to help him die. He achieves his goal in a videotaped end in which he argues that what he is doing is his right and that no others should be blamed or prosecuted for it, sips poison through a straw, and dies.

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The exquisite young artist, Angélique (Tautou) sends a rose to her lover, the cardiologist Loic Le Garrec (Le Bihan). She is planning a future with him; the only problem is that he is married. But he has promised to leave his wife. Angélique is little troubled that the couple are expecting a baby and when the pregnancy is lost following an accident, she believes the day will be soon.

Her medical student friend, David, worries that she is being used and is appalled by the accumulation of disappointments and slights that Angélique must endure. She falls apart, neglects herself and the home and exotic plants that she has been watching for friends, but when she hears that Loic has been accused of assault by a female patient, she is utterly disbelieving. The patient is found dead and the doctor falls under suspicion.

Rapid rewind, and the movie begins again with the rose, and by repeating a handful of earlier scenes, retells the same events from the perspective of the doctor. He has no idea who is the sender of the rose, and as the flowers, notes, and gifts accumulate he grows more distracted, even angry, and his wife is suspicious.

It emerges that Angélique and Loic have barely ever spoken to each other and that she actually volunteered for house-sitting next door, in order to be close to him. The accident that caused the miscarriage was Angélique’s attempt to kill his wife by running her down with a motor scooter. The patient who charged the doctor with assault was wrongly mistaken by him for the secret admirer; he struck her out of anger and fear. She presses charges against him and pursues him through the courts until she is murdered by Angélique.

But the doctor knows none of that. When Angélique attempts suicide with gas, he saves her life and she is all the more smitten. Gradually the doctor realizes her real identity and the police link her to the murder. She is sent to a psychiatric hospital.

Years pass. Loic and his wife have two beautiful children. Angélique is finally discharged with reassurance that she will be well as long as she takes her medicine. In the final scene, the caretaker moves a large cupboard to find all the pills that she had been prescribed over four years pasted to the wall in a larger-than-life portrait of Loic.

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This Japanese horror story is set in a hospital in financial crisis, short of supplies and staff. We see various nurses and doctors struggling with their working conditions. A patient is injured falling out of bed, a nurse practices her IV technique on an unconscious burn patient, a demented woman wanders the hallways talking to apparitions she sees in mirrors. Two events set the central plot in motion: the burn patient dies because of a medication error and those present—Dr Akiba (Koichi Sato) who was responsible and Dr Uozumi (Masanobu Takashima) who was supervising, as well as the nurse who gave the lethal dose and her supervisor—decide to cover up the mistake, and a patient is brought to the ER suffering from a mysterious infection that is liquefying his internal organs.

Dr Akai (Shirô Sano), a senior physician, demands that Drs Akiba and Uozumi begin a study of the infected patient, despite their terror. The patient is never shown directly, but we see green ooze running from his bed. Akai argues that that discovering the pathogen causing this illness will raise money for the hospital, but the real incentive he offers is blackmail: he knows about the mistake and the cover-up.

As the night proceeds, all those involved in the error are infected, taking on zombie-like characteristics, behaving abnormally (a nurse attempts to transfuse her own blood into a corpse; a doctor tries to strangle a patient who has asked to have his pain relieved) and oozing green fluid before dying. With Dr Akiba, however, we begin to realize that the pathogen is not purely somatic. Dr Akai may in fact be the dead burn patient, the “green” ooze is red blood seen through the distorted perception of those haunted by guilt, and the title’s infection is the contagious fear felt by health care professionals who, for various reasons, are incapable of the infallible work of healing that is expected of them.

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Thin, a documentary film produced, aired and distributed by HBO, is the centerpiece of a multi-faceted project that explores the complex issues of body images and eating disorders in young women. Photographer and journalist Lauren Greenfield began documenting eating disorders in 1997, eventually publishing an article for Time Magazine and a book entitled Girl Culture, as well as producing a traveling photographic exhibit. Returning to one of the facilities featured in the exhibit, Greenfield took up residence at the Renfrew Center, an in-patient facility for eating disorders in Florida, to film the day-to-day suffering of four young women struggling with anorexia over the course of six months.

The youngest is Brittany, a sad and troubled fifteen-year old, whose bulimia and anorexia began when she was only eight (her weight bounced from 185 to 95 pounds in one year) and whose mother has her own very unhealthy relationship to food. Brittany is eventually returned to her weight-obsessed mother because of the loss of insurance. Shelly, a twenty-five year-old, psychiatric nurse, has been anorexic for six years and enters Renfrew at 84 pounds with a surgically-implanted feeding tube. Her identical twin visits to plead with Shelly to refrain from slowly killing herself and ultimately destroying their family. Polly is a twenty-nine year old, charming troublemaker whose health is returning but whose defiance of rules eventually gets her kicked out of the facility. The oldest patient is Alisa, a thirty-year old, divorced mother of two whose eating disorder ostensibly developed at age seven when a pediatrician persuaded her mother to put her plump daughter on a severe diet. Alisa's graphic account of a single day of binging and purging is shocking, and her forced release from Renfrew because of problems with health insurance precipitates a return to this pattern after she tucks her children into bed.

 

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Paul Edgecombe (Tom Hanks) is in charge of death row in a 1935 Louisiana penitentiary. The cell block is nicknamed "The Green Mile?due to its green linoleum floor--the path that an inmate must walk from his cell to the room with the electric chair. Paul, a decent, moral man, treats each prisoner with respect. His life changes, however, with the admission of John Coffey (Michael Clarke Duncan), a huge African-American man convicted of the rape and murder of two young sisters. Despite his powerful build, Coffey is gentle--and possesses a miraculous, mysterious power to heal.

Coffey heals Paul's bladder infection, resurrects a dead mouse, Mr. Jingles, that is the treasure of another inmate, "Del,?and cures the warden's wife of her inoperable brain cancer. Each healing requires direct contact between Coffey and the "patient,?and is accompanied by much electric and mystical effects. Coffey takes the infection, brokenness, disease into his body and is able to expel it, though it exhausts him.

Coffey's powers extend to visions and he directly feels the pain of others. He transmits his visions of the death of the two girls to Paul--who realizes that Coffey is innocent (indeed he had been trying to "heal?the children when he was apprehended) and that another inmate on the green mile is guilty of the crime. Paul, counseled by his supportive wife (Bonnie Hunt), asks Coffey what to do. Coffey, exhausted from suffering the knowledge of the evil of the world and cognizant of his lowly position as a poor black man, asks to have the execution proceed. His only request is to watch a "flicker show.?Paul arranges for him to see a Fred Astaire movie.

The executions are graphically depicted. One is particularly gruesome because of the evilness of the whiny, rookie guard, Percy, who deliberately causes a prisoner (Del) to suffer in the extreme. After giving the orders for Coffey's execution and watching him die, Paul quits his job.

The story is framed by Paul as an old man in a nursing home. Paul "tells?his story to another elderly "inmate?as an explanation for why he was overcome when watching the Fred Astaire movie in the common room. Paul reveals that he is far older than thought possible--as is Mr. Jingles who is still alive six decades later. Paul and the mouse were "infected with life?when touched by Coffey.

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Chicago architect Stourley Kracklite (Brian Dennehy) and his much younger, beautiful wife, Louisa (Chloe Webb), arrive in Italy to work for a year preparing an exhibition on his hero, the post-revolutionary French architect, Etienne-Louis Boullée (d. 1799). They make love as the train enters Italy; however, he scarcely looks at his wife again. On the evening of his welcoming dinner--set in the piazza in front of the Pantheon--Kracklite is wracked by the first of the endless, excruciating pains in his belly.

Louisa is pregnant, but in boredom and frustration, she takes an Italian lover, Caspasian (Lambert Wilson). The dashing, young architect has designs on the American's exhibition as well as on his wife; his photographer sister, Flavia, shares the intrigue. Kracklite entertains the hypothesis that his unfaithful wife is trying to poison him. A doctor tells him that the sinister pains are due to his lifestyle, but he does not believe this diagnosis and drifts into a subdued paranoia with delusions of persecution and of grandeur.

Obsessed with the shapes and contents--the architecture and the anatomy--of bellies in sculpture, painting, and photography, Kracklite photocopies ever larger and larger images which he "maps" on to his own prodigious abdomen. He writes postcards to Boulleé pouring out his fears. He identifies with Roman emperors, Christ, and Isaac Newton, to whom Boullée designed a never-constructed, hemispheric cenotaph, the belly-like model of which appears often, recapitulating Kracklite's obsession and Louisa's pregnancy.

After he learns he has cancer, he ends his life by falling backward in a Christ-like posture through a window during the opening ceremony of his Boullée project. At that same moment, his wife gives birth to their child, having cut the ribbon/cord to open the hemispherical exhibition.

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David Lynch’s The Elephant Man is based on the life of Joseph Merrick (1862-1890), a man who we first encounter in the film as “The Elephant Man” of a freak show, whose physical differences are so frightening to the authorities that the exhibit is closed. An ambitious young surgeon, Frederick Treves (Anthony Hopkins), seeks out Merrick (John Hurt) as a subject for a presentation to the Pathological Society and, taken by Merrick’s intelligence and amiability, arranges for Merrick to have a permanent home on the premises of London Hospital. The film portrays Treves as rescuing Merrick from a wretched existence in the squalid wharf district, where he is beaten savagely and otherwise abused by his sideshow manager, Bytes.

Treves provides Merrick with modest bourgeois comfort in the form of private rooms on the hospital premises. When the London Times publishes a letter from the hospital director describing Merrick’s disfigurement as terrifying and requiring isolation, first a famous actress, then most of London high society seek out Merrick, some to befriend him, others to indulge in spectatorship or the fashion of the day. A hospital porter who has access to Merrick’s room brings drunken revelers to view Merrick for a fee, giving the villainous Bytes the opportunity to kidnap Merrick and spirit him off to Belgium and a desperate existence as an abused and degraded sideshow freak.

Eventually, the other members of the freak show free Merrick and send him back to London, where, in a dramatic chase scene, he is pursued by an angry mob until the police arrive. Treves is summoned and reinstalls Merrick in his rooms at the hospital. Merrick is then celebrated by society when he attends his first theater performance. That night, he arranges himself to be able to sleep lying down, like a “normal person,” a position he knows will lead to his asphyxiation due to the size of his head, and he dies.

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A saxophone-playing, divorced psychiatrist, Dr. Denis, is baffled by the unexplained arrival of a new patient in his mental hospital. The highly intelligent newcomer, called Rantes, has extraordinary gifts and spends long hours in the yard facing southeast, where he claims to receive communications from his home planet. He is visited by the saintly Beatriz, who works in a church, and Denis asks her questions about Rantes.

The bond between the three people begins to transgress the ordinary boundaries between doctor and patient, and culminates in an excursion to a concert in the park. Charmed by Beethoven's "Song of Joy," Rantes instigates generalized waltzing and takes over from an inexplicably obliging conductor. Back in the asylum, the other patients feel the vibrations emanating from Rantes' concert and engage in a good-humored romp. The doctor is reprimanded for the embarrassing situation, and begins to doubt the integrity of the psychiatric enterprise. A weakened Rantes dies after electroshock therapy and the film ends in ambiguity.

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