Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party takes place over 24 hours at the birthday pool party of 17-year-old preacher’s kid Henry Gamble. The party guests include adults and teenagers from his church, as well as Henry’s “secular” friends, including the closeted young Logan, who has eyes for Henry.
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Five thought-provoking shorts imagine what Hong Kong will be like ten years from now. In Extras, two genial low-level gangsters are hired to stage an attack, but they’re mere sacrificial lambs in a political conspiracy. Rebels strive to preserve destroyed homes and objects as specimens in the mesmerizing Season of the End. In Dialect, a taxi driver struggles to adjust after Putonghua displaces Cantonese as Hong Kong’s only official language. Following the death of a leading independence activist, an act of self-immolation outside the British consulate triggers questions and protests in the searing yet moving Self-Immolator. In Local Egg, a grocery shop owner worries about his son’s youth guard activities and where to buy eggs after Hong Kong’s last chicken farm closes down.
A US soldier suffers a traumatic brain injury while fighting in Afghanistan and struggles to adjust to life back home in New Orleans. When she meets local mechanic James, the pair begin to forge an unexpected bond.
Sex is power, and Waseem, a Syrian gay-for-pay hustler seeking asylum in Cologne, wields it like a shield. Keeping his johns at an emotional arm’s length while satisfying their most carnal desires in order to eke out a living, he meets his match in Lars: a kind, affluent professional with a growing personal interest in Waseem. This gripping tale of transactional identity explores the tactical exchange of trust and intimacy in a partnership, and the divisions between immigrants and their host countries in contemporary Europe.
The Invisible Patients tells the story of Jessica Macleod, a nurse practitioner, and four homebound patients she cares for in Evansville, Indiana.
The breakout of the war shatters the world of a young student, Lyudmila Pavlichenko, forcing her to enlist in the army in 1941. The maiden turns out to be a natural-born sniper, her impressive skill and prowess make her stand out among men and women alike. Seeing Pavlichenko as a tangible threat, the German High Command gives orders to eliminate the girl whatever the cost. In the meanwhile, Lyudmila meets a man and falls in love. War fades into the background… Soon, however, another misfortune befalls Lyudmila leaving the man she loves on the brink of death and herself seriously wounded. The girl is pulled out of combat and later goes to the United States with a publicity visit. Eleanor Roosevelt welcomes Lyudmila in the White House and the two women soon become close. It won’t be long before Pavlichenko stands before an audience in Chicago pressing for a second front. Will her words have the capacity to change the course of war?
Set in Indiana in 1987, Pike Ables is charged with a murder he can’t remember in the midst of heroin withdrawal. Now, he must make a decision: go to jail or head for the Canadian border to start a new life. His only hope is his younger brother, Jack, a frustrated psychiatrist and soon-to-be father who is ready to leave everything behind – including his pregnant wife – to try and save him. Things aren’t as they seem when the brothers try to navigate out of the darkness and into the light.
In this unique and riveting film, a troubled man has a series of dreams in which he finds himself thrown back to a time before his birth, into the Angolan Border War, as a combat soldier. There he meets his father as a young man, when he was a member of the Special Forces. As they go through combat together, the son gets to know his father in a way he never has, giving him insight and compassion, and he is able to let go of lifelong feelings of abandonment, resentment and anger. This leads to forgiveness and a real-life reconciliation, which drives home the underlying message of this film restoring the hearts of the fathers to the children and the hearts of the children to the fathers.
Masaharu Fukuyama reprises his role from 2008’s “Suspect X,” playing the physicist-cum-detective Manabu Yukawa. The scientist-sleuth arrives in an oceanside town to speak on a panel. But when a man turns up dead outside the inn where he’s staying, Yukawa begins to unravel the connections that tie the victim to the activist daughter of the innkeepers, and a precocious boy who first appears on a train—and keeps popping up. It’s a Sherlock Holmes mystery with an environmental twist, and one that should please fans of a classic whodunnit.
