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Shaolin Soccer and Kung Fu Hustle director Stephen Chow returns to the helm for this sci-fi comedy about a struggling single father whose quest to find the perfect toy yields out-of-this-world results. Ti (Chow) is a poor construction worker who breaks his back to ensure that his young son Dicky (Xu Jiao) can stay enrolled in an exclusive private school. But while Ti does everything possible to give his son the opportunities that he never had, Dicky still feels like a classroom reject due to his tattered clothes and lack of the latest toys. Dicky's classmates all play with the coolest and most expensive gadgets that money can buy, so how is a kid who gets his toys from the local junkyard ever supposed to fit in? One day, while scrounging through the trash heap in search of a new toy, Ti discovers a mysterious orb and brings it straight back to Dicky. Though at first the "CJ7" appears to be little more than an unidentifiable oddity, it proves to be much, much more once the young boy starts to play with it. This isn't your average action figure, but a living "pet" with extraordinary powers. Realizing that his new toy may be just the thing to help him fit in with his demanding classmates, Dicky brings the CJ7 to school with him in order to show it off and have some fun. But the CJ7 has its own ideas about how to have fun, and it isn't long before the situation at school gets hopelessly out of hand. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide
Two buddies are taken down different paths in life when one becomes a success and the other fails to grab the brass ring in this comedy drama. Erik (Espen Klouman-Hoiner) and Phillip (Anders Danielsen Lie) are close friends who have known each other since they were children. Erik and Phillip grew up sharing a passion for literature, particularly the work of novelist Sten Egil Dahl (Sigmund Sæverud) and they each dreamed of becoming writers themselves someday. Both Erik and Phillip completed their first novels in their early twenties, but while Phillip's book was accepted by a major publisher and became a best-seller, Erik's book instead earned a sheaf of rejection slips. The harsh glare of the celebrity lifestyle and his obsessive relationship with his girlfriend, Kari (Viktoria Winge), cause Phillip to suffer a nervous breakdown, and after a stay in a treatment facility he tries to resume his relationship with Kari and his friendship with Erik. Erik, meanwhile, is still struggling to join the ranks of the published, and his romance with Lillian (Silje Hagen) begins to fray as the frustrated would-be author spends more time with Phillip and his pretentious compatriots. Reprise received its North American premiere at the 2006 Toronto Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
Visually minded filmmaker Tarsem Singh returns to the director's chair for the first time since The Cell (2000) with this psychologically complex tale of a hospitalized paraplegic with a curious knack for storytelling. Unable to free himself from his sterile confines, the immobile patient's deepest fears form the basis of a dark story that he shares with his young companion -- a little girl who visits his room as she recovers from a nasty fall. As the eerie tale unfolds, reality and fantasy gradually merge to form a strange world in which anything is possible. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide
Foreign Award Winners
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Eccentric inventor Wallace (voice of Peter Sallis) and his faithful if often perplexed dog Gromit are back in their first feature-length adventure from animator Nick Park. Wallace and Gromit have launched a new business venture just in time for a major gardening competition in their neighborhood of West Wallaby. "Anti-Pesto" is a humane pest-relocation service in which Wallace and Gromit capture rabbits and other critters who have been eating the produce from local gardens and give them new homes somewhere else. Business has been going well, and when the woman hosting the garden show, Lady Tottington (voice of Helena Bonham Carter), discovers a massive tribe of rabbits has been making a mess of her garden, she calls in Wallace and Gromit to move the bunnies elsewhere. Wallace is quite taken with Lady Tottington, but he's not the only one -- Victor Quartermaine (voice of Ralph Fiennes) is a slick but arrogant upper-class type who wants to win Lady Tottington's hand (and fortune) and is convinced he can do a better job capturing the rabbits than Wallace. However, Wallace's attempts to brainwash the rabbits away from veggies using his latest invention has disastrous results, and soon Wallace has to deal with a beastly bunny as well as a heavily-armed Quartermaine. Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit followed Park's previous film with the duo, A Close Shave, by ten years, and was produced after Park broke through to mainstream success with the feature Chicken Run. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
All of London is in love -- or longing to be -- in Four Weddings and a Funeral writer Richard Curtis' first directorial effort. Billed as "the ultimate romantic comedy," Love Actually involves more than a dozen main characters, each weaving his or her way into another's heart over the course of one particularly eventful Christmas. The seemingly perfect wedding of Juliet (Keira Knightley) and Peter (Chiwetel Ejiofor) brings many of the principals together, including heartsick best man Mark (Andrew Lincoln), who harbors a very unrequited crush on Juliet. There's also recent widower Daniel (Liam Neeson), trying to help his lonely stepson Sam (Thomas Sangster) express his true feelings to a classmate. Across town, devoted working mother Karen (Emma Thompson) tries to rekindle the passion of her husband, Harry (Alan Rickman), who secretly pines for a young colleague of his. In the same office, the lonely Sarah (Laura Linney) not-so-secretly pines for a man just a few desks away (Rodrigo Santoro), who returns her affections but may not be able to dissuade her neuroses. Providing the unofficial soundtrack for all of the couples is an aging rocker (Bill Nighy) who just wants to cash in and get laid -- but even he might find a meaningful relationship in the most unlikely of places. A working print of Love Actually premiered at the 2003 Toronto International Film Festival. ~ Michael Hastings, All Movie Guide
