 Strictly Ballroom, Strictly Come Dancing… No problems in finding an audience for a film about dance. This is a very entertaining documentary from New York City where a program of teaching ballroom dancing to young children in schools and entering their teams in competition has been growing since the mid 1990s. |
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At the end of Lower City, we see signposts which signal the way to the Upper City of Salvador, Brazil. That is where the wealthy and the privileged live. |
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Some audiences who have not done their homework to find out what this film is about will be attracted by the promises of a salacious-sounding title. |
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 It is probably true that some British housekeepers are battleaxes. But most of them don’t wield an axe, especially on unsuspecting neighbours. |
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 This is one of those films where it is best to suspend final judgment until the very end credits.
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Japanese animation artist and director, Hayao Miyazaki, won an Oscar for Best Animated Film for Spirited Away, an extraordinary tour-de-force of imaginative storytelling with continually mesmerising design and colour. |
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What if your name were Erica Yurken? What if you had ambitions to be a famous actress? What if you could not stand your family, your older sister who is always out on dates and a younger sister who for years has thought she was a horse? |
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 Book and film the 4th. I like this one best. The first two saw Harry, Ron and Hermione as younger children and the films were geared to the younger audiences who identify with the characters and their adventures.
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 Terror on a plane is a good old standby for a popular suspense thriller. We have seen plenty of hijackers, mad bombers, merciless terrorists. What about a distraught widow whose daughter disappears?
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 A young Jewish New Yorker is told that ‘everything is illuminated by the past’.
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 Doom is a video game. The film follows the trend to make live action features out of popular video games. It does this sleekly with the full range of special effects. |
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Billed as a Hong Kong modern Romeo and Juliet, there is definitely something in the allusion to Shakespeare and young and immature love. However, Romeo and Juliet die. Fu and Nam have to live. |
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Yet another documentary that has drawn audiences out of home and away from their TV sets. |
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These penguins made a surprisingly successful march during the 2005 summer through the American box-office with more tickets sold than for many holiday films. Documentaries have to be very well made to excite the word of mouth that persuades people to come out to see a film. It seems that the penguins did not disappoint. There are millions of people out there who enjoy nature documentaries, who are devotees of National Geographic programs and the Discovery Channel who appreciate an opportunity to look, close-up, at a year in the life of the Emperor Penguins of Antarctica.
How they live in Antarctica and why they stay remains something of a mystery even after we watch the film. After all, the penguins in the summer comedy Madagascar, were escaping from New York zoo to migrate to Antarctica. It seems they think they were misinformed and so gave up the ice and snow and turned up in tropical Madagascar.
Antarctica is snow and ice and frigid water under the icecaps. The summer lights are long but still cold. The winter darkness, despite the Aurora, is long and long. To see the penguins marching single file over the icy wastes, standing day after day, week after week, huddling together to find some warmth while their bellies are empty and a enduring a long wait until they are filled again with the mother penguins returning from a hundred kilometre trek to the water to fill up on fish (and try to avoid death from sea predators), almost defies belief.
Director, Luc Jacquet, and his team spent a year in the Antarctic, filming a great deal of footage but not knowing how well their material had turned out because lab facilities were so far away. One can only admire the courage, patience and human endurance in remaining to film the story of the penguins. Much of the film is quite spectacular, enabling the audience to live quite easily and vicariously this experience of life and death, of birth and nurture.
The cycle of reproduction, of the laying of the eggs, of the fathers’ protection and incubating of the eggs, of the mothers’ foraging the food, the companionship of the surviving families, the growth of the chicks and their independence and the fact that the cycle begins again and the family never more see each other is quite movingly portrayed.
The English version has a voiceover by Morgan Freeman which brings great ‘gravitas’ to the events. Humans are prone to anthropomorphise animals and their stories, to make the parallels with human life, trying to see how animals are just like us. (Christian groups in the United States were reported as recommending the films to their congregations because of the emphasis on family values). The original French version actually has a voice cast of prominent actors (Charles Berling, Romane Bohringer) playing the dialogue between some of the penguins as does the Japanese version. How this works, or how cute it is, English-language audiences will never know. They have to be satisfied (and are, with good reason) with Morgan Freeman’s commentary.
This may be a good moment to mention the French tradition of nature documentaries, especially for audiences who may not have caught up with Microcosmos and Winged Migration. |
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The illegal arms trade. Most audiences might not have the interest or the patience to watch a documentary chronicling the history of illegal arms dealing, especially since the fall of the Soviet Union with the sudden supply of Kalashnikovs and rockets and all kinds of hardware not wanted for Cold War threats or use.
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In October 2005, the premiere of Left Behind: World at War (complete with searchlights and stars) was held not in a theatre but in the Hollywood Presbyterian Church. |
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Action, romance
and comedy. Ingredients for a crowd-pleaser. Capitalising on the huge
popularity of 1998’s The Mask of Zorro, stars, director and many of the
production team have come together again to bring us what may well be
one of the most popular films of 2005.
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 In the 1950s, a popular genre of action films was that of the deep sea diving thriller, with titles like Beneath the Twelve Mile Reef.
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It is a pity that this film had troubled production and delays and has not had a wide release. |
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 Here is a raucous comedy that most people will not mind missing.
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Movie reviews 
Habitus is proud to present movie critique from a Christian perspective done by Signis president and a life-time movie lover Fr. Peter Malone MSC..jpg)
These penguins made a surprisingly successful march during the 2005 summer through the American box-office with more tickets sold than for many holiday films. 
