Brooklyn, 1988. Crime is rife, especially drugs and drug violence. A Russian thug is building his heroin trade, while everyone laughs at the cops. Brothers have chosen different paths: Joe has followed his father Bert into New York’s Finest; he’s a rising star. Bobby, who uses his mother’s maiden name, manages a club. Bobby too is on the rise: he has a new girlfriend and a green-light to develop a Manhattan club. Joe and Bert ask him to help with intelligence gathering; he declines. Then, Joe raids Bobby’s club to arrest the Russian. From there, things spiral out of control: the Russian puts out a hit on Joe, personal losses mount, and Bobby’s loyalties face the test. Written by {jhailey@hotmail.com}

When 4 year old Amanda McCready disappears from her home and the police make little headway in solving the case, the girl’s aunt Beatrice McCready hires two private detectives Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro. The detective freely admit that they have little experience with this type of case, but the family wants them for two reasons - they’re not cops and they know the tough neighborhood in which they all live. As the case progresses, Kenzie and Gennaro face drug dealers, gangs and pedophiles. When they finally solve the case, they are faced with a moral dilemma that tears them apart. Written by garykmcd

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What you’ve heard is true. The last 30 minutes of The Kingdom are incredibly intense. Bullets fly at a frantic pace and director Peter Berg’s in your face style and fast cutting put you in the center of the action. The final shootout is so realistic you may feel the need to bob and weave away from the bullets, even though you know you’re sitting safely in a darkened theater and it’s just a movie. Feel free to dodge away.

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Jigsaw and his apprentice Amanda are dead. Now, upon the news of Detective Kerry’s murder, two seasoned FBI profilers, Agent Strahm and Agent Perez, arrive in the terrified community to assist the veteran Detective Hoffman in sifting through Jigsaw’s latest grisly remains and piecing together the puzzle. However, when SWAT Commander Rigg is abducted and thrust into a game, the last officer untouched by Jigsaw has but ninety minutes to overcome a series of demented traps and save an old friend or face the deadly consequences. Written by Lionsgate

Stanley Goodspeed, who lives in Washington D.C., is a biochemist who works for the FBI. Soon after his fiancée Carla Pestalozzi announces that she is pregnant, Stanley gets a call from FBI director James Womack. Womack tells Stanley that San Francisco’s Alcatraz Island has been taken hostage, along with 81 tourists, by marine General Francis Xavier Hummel who, for years, has been protesting the government’s refusal to pay benefits to families of war veterans who died during covert military operations. The death of his wife Barbara Hummel on March 9, 1995 drove General Hummel over the edge, and now he’s holding hostages in order to get his point across. Stanley is needed because General Himmel has stolen some VX gas warheads and has announced that he will launch them onto San Francisco unless his demands are met. Stanley knows how to disarm the bombs, but Stanley needs someone who knows Alcatraz well enough to get him inside. That man is former British intelligence agent John Patrick Mason, who has been in prison for the past 30 years without a trial because he was accused of stealing the private files of J. Edgar Hoover. In 1962, John became the only inmate ever to escape from Alcatraz, and he stayed out of Alcatraz long enough to father a daughter named Jade Angelou. Despite his extreme hatred of the FBI, John agrees to help Stanley. When John and Stanley are sent into Alcatraz with a Navy SEAL team, General Hummel’s men kill the entire SEAL team, leaving Stanley and John to work on their own to rescue the hostages. Written by Todd Baldridge

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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. Written by Mac

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Jeff is an anguished man, who grieves and misses his young son that was killed by a driver in a car accident. He has become obsessed for revenge against the man and reckless with his wife and daughter. When Dr. Lynn Denlon, who has troubles with her marriage, is abducted by the deranged Jigsaw’s apprentice Amanda, she is brought to a gruesome warehouse to keep John Kramer alive in spite of having a terminal brain tumor. Amanda puts a necklace gadget full of explosives around Dr. Lynn’s neck connected to John Kramer’s life support system, and tells her that if he dies the device will explode. Meanwhile, Jeff is submitted to a sick game of forgiveness with surprising dark consequences. Written by Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

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Do you ever feel like everyone but you is in on the joke? I didn’t feel that way with Wes Anderson’s other films – “Bottle Rocket,” “Rushmore,” or the amazing “Royal Tenenbaums.” Those films were clever but never condescending. Those I understood and basically stood in awe of. But from the title to the bizarre action sequences, “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou” left me feeling like an outsider looking in.

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Rural Australia in the late nineteenth century: Capt. Stanley and his men capture two of the four Burns brothers, Charlie and Mike. Their gang is held responsible for attacking the Hopkins farm, raping pregnant Mrs. Hopkins and murdering the whole family. Arthur Burns, the eldest brother and the gang’s mastermind, remains at large has and has retreated to a mountain hideout. Capt. Stanley’s proposition to Charlie is to gain pardon and - more importantly - save his beloved younger brother Mike from the gallows by finding and killing Arthur within nine days. Written by Armin Ortmann {armin@sfb288.math.tu-berlin.de}

With this sequel to his prize-winning independent previous film, “El Mariachi,” director Robert Rodriquez joins the ranks of Sam Peckinpah and John Woo as a master of slick, glamorized ultra-violence. We pick up the story as a continuation of “El Mariachi,” where an itinerant musician, looking for work, gets mistaken for a hitman and thereby entangled in a web of love, corruption, and death. This time, he is out to avenge the murder of his lover and the maiming of his fretting hand, which occurred at the end of the earlier movie. However, the plot is recapitulated, and again, a case of mistaken identity leads to a very high body count, involvement with a beautiful woman who works for the local drug lord, and finally, the inevitable face-to-face confrontation and bloody showdown. Written by Tad Dibbern {DIBBERN_D@a1.mscf.upenn.edu}

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