The Pulpmovies Trailer Park

Tsotsi is a psychological thriller in which the protagonist is compelled to confront his own brutal nature and face the consequences of his actions. It puts a human face on both the victims and the perpetrators of violent crime and is ultimately a story of hope and a triumph of love over rage.

Tsotsi n. thug, gangster, hoodlum

Set amidst the sprawling Johannesburg township of Soweto - where survival is the primary objective - Tsotsi traces six days in the life of a ruthless young gang leader who ends up caring for a baby accidentally kidnapped during a car-jacking.

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Andrew Christopher Erin’s Sam’s Lake is a remake of his 2002 short of the same title.

Near a lake in an isolated area, an escaped psychiatric patient makes his way through the surrounding wilderness, back to his childhood home, slaughtering his family in their sleep, then runs into the woods never to be found. Many years later the horrifying massacre has turned legend as disappearances haunt the surrounding towns.

Sam(Fay Masterson), a young woman who, every summer, returns home to the secluded lakeside cottage where she grew up,
reconnects with her traditions, old friends and memories of the past.

This year, a group of hip, young urbanites, Kate(Sandrine Holt), Franklin(Stephen Bishop), Melanie(Megan Fahlenbock) and
Dominik(Salvatore Antonio) join Sam on her annual trip. But when Sam and her friend Jesse(William Gregory Lee), a local to the area, take the group on an adventure to revisit the site of the murder they all come face to face with the terrifying legend of ‘Sam’s Lake‘.

The Trailer

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In a nothing bar in a small, nowhere industrial town, sits Andy – a nice guy down on his luck. Jobs have come and gone. Crazy moneymaking enterprises have crumbled to dust. His ex–wife has married a rich guy who can buy his only son all the things that Andy can‘t afford. All Andy‘s got is a bunch of loving loser friends and a desire to do something to change his destiny. Staring morosely at the small ads in the town paper it comes to him in a flash – he‘ll make a porno film! With his friends!

The Trailer

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It’s not often that I find myself pluging a romantic comedy, but Side Effects is also a satirical look at the pharmaceutical industry.

Karly Hert has spent the last ten years selling drugs…legally, that is.

Although conflicted on a daily basis by the values within the pharmaceutical industry, an industry driven by profits at the expense of patients; Karly has been seduced by the golden handcuffs of corporate America.

Enter Zach Danner, who convinces Karly to be true to her values and walk away from her lucrative but empty job. As their relationship blossoms, Karly devises a plan to get out. But leaving is never quite as easy as it seems…

Side Effects is closely based on the writer / director’s decade working directly for the pharmaceutical industry as a drug sales rep.

The Trailer

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Sorry, Haters is a story of anger, revenge and retribution that begins when Ashade, a Muslim cab driver (Abdellatif Kechiche), picks up Phoebe (Robin Wright Penn), a well-heeled professional woman. Although Ashade and Phobe have nothing in common, each holds troubling urges and secret motivations. When Phoebe takes an interest in exonerating Ashade’s brothers, who is in jail, a series of events are set in motion resulting in the revelation of a devastating hidden truth.

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There are times when what you really want to see is a full scale, big budget historical fantasy - the sort of film that really can only be appreciated in the cinema. And, if that’s you mood, then Tristan + Isolde is well worth a look.

After the fall of Rome, the warlords of England are brutally kept in line by the forces of Irish King Donnchadh. One of these leaders, Lord Marke (Rufus Sewell) seeks to unite the English tribes to form one strong nation to rule itself. His greatest knight is Tristan (James Franco), whom Marke raised since he was orphaned in an Irish attack that also took Marke’s family. With Tristan by his side, Marke believes he can unify his people and rid England of Irish rule. But Tristan harbors a terrible secret…

Wounded and left for dead after battle, he is nursed back to health by Isolde (Sophia Myles), a mysterious Irish beauty who hides him from her father, King Donnchadh’s, forces and brings him back to life. But their passionate affair is cut short when Tristan must return to England, not knowing if he will see Isolde again.

Still seeking to throw the English tribes back into chaos, King Donnchadh gives away his daughter as the prize in a tournament between all the champions of England. Tristan wins the princess’ hand for Lord Marke, whose vision of a united England may finally be realized.

Tristan is horrified to see that the woman he has won for his Lord, the woman whom Marke will marry, is his Irish savior Isolde. Worse, Marke is a good and worthy future king, whose belief in Tristan has made the young knight who he is.

First separated by countries at war, and now by loyalty to King and country, Tristan and Isolde must suppress their emotions for the sake of peace and the future of England. But the more they deny their passion, the more fiercely it burns. Despite their efforts to stay apart, Tristan and Isolde are driven inexorably together, risking everything for one last moment in each other’s arms.

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Brick - which won the Sundance Film Festival’s Special Jury Prize for Originality of Vision - is a film that looks well worth catching.

Brick, while taking its cues and its verbal style from the novels of Dashiell Hammett, also honors the rich cinematic tradition of the hard-boiled noir mystery, here wittily and bracingly immersed in fresh territory – a modern-day Southern California neighborhood and high school. There, student Brendan Frye’s (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) piercing intelligence spares no one. Brendan is not afraid to back up his words with actions, and knows all the angles; yet he prefers to stay an outsider, and does – until the day that his ex-girlfriend, Emily (Emilie de Ravin of “Lost”), reaches out to him unexpectedly and then vanishes. Brendan’s feelings for her still run deep; so much so, that he becomes consumed with finding his troubled inamorata.

To find her, Brendan enlists the aid of his only true peer, The Brain (Matt O’Leary), while keeping the assistant vice principal (Richard Roundtree) only occasionally informed of what quickly becomes a dangerous investigation. Brendan’s single-minded unearthing of students’ secrets thrusts him headlong into the colliding social orbits of rich-girl sophisticate Laura (Nora Zehetner), intimidating Tugger (Noah Fleiss), substance-abusing Dode (Noah Segan), seductive Kara (Meagan Good), jock Brad (Brian White) and – most ominously – non-student The Pin (Lukas Haas). It is only by gaining acceptance into The Pin’s closely guarded inner circle of crime and punishment that Brendan will be able to uncover hard truths about himself, Emily and the suspects that he is getting closer to.

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I can’t tell you a great deal about Danny and Oxide Pang’s latest film, Re-Cycle, but visually it looks stunning.

The plot centres on a young woman writer whose work in progress, “The Recycle” deals with supernatuaral forces. As the book progresses, she begins to see things which cannot be explained, including a woman who appears repeatedly at certain places.

One night, the writer decides to follow the woman into the other world…

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Autobiographical filmmaker Caveh Zahedi has made a cult career of his unabashed willingness to be vulnerable on camera. I Am a Sex Addict, a comic reconstruction of his ten-year struggle with sex addiction, is one of his most ambitious, hilarious confessions yet.

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Sketches of Frank Gehry is director Sydney Pollack’s first feature length documentary on the acclaimed architect, Frank O. Gehry.

The two men have been friends for many years, and Pollack completed the film over a period of five years, starting in 2000.

Frank Gehry loves to sketch; it is the beginning of his architectural process. And it is his love of the sketch that gave Pollack his first clues to the style of this documentary film. Beginning with Gehry’s own original sketches for each major project, the film explores Gehry’s process of turning these abstract drawings, first into tangible, three-dimensional models, often made simply of cardboard and scotch tape, then into finished buildings of titanium and glass, concrete and steel, wood and stone.

To capture the sketch quality in the documentary, Pollack uses a combination of film and Mini DV (digital video) as his media. Spending countless hours in Gehry’s studio, on building sites, and in his home, this unobtrusive and quiet shooting style has captured, for the first time, the essence of Gehry’s unique architectural process, and his shy and elusive personality.

As a counterpoint to the deliberate informality – the sketch quality – of Pollack’s work with the video camera, he painstakingly captures on film, the grandeur of Gehry’s architecture, from his earliest building, a hay barn in California, to what are now recognized to be some of the great buildings of the modern era, including the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.

The dialogue between Pollack and Gehry, as intimate as that of any two friends of long standing, courses like a continuous melodic line through the film.

At the heart of the film is the low-key, informal quality that Pollack brings to his conversations with Gehry, and the many other participants in the film. This is not a film about rarified architectural theory. On the contrary, Pollack’s ability to pierce the skin of architectural theory allows him to draw deep insights into the life of this extraordinary architect and his singular architectural process.

The Trailer

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