Movie Land

An aspiring medical student whose sister has recently died and who may be forced to relocate from a private school to the neighbourhood in which she was raised enters a step-dancing competition in hopes of securing the funds needed to continue her education. Unable to afford the tuition needed to fund her private-school education, ambitious teen Raya (Rutina Wesley) returns to her family home in the city while reluctantly forced to re-evaluate her future. Upon learning that the top prize for an upcoming step-dancing competition is $50,000, Raya uses her impressive moves to earn a coveted slot in her good friend Bishop’s (Dwain Murphy) predominately male JSJ crew. Isolated from the local females due to jealousy and separated from her fellow dancers by gender, the ambitious dancer is subsequently kicked-off the team for showing off during a preliminary competition. Now, if Raya has any hope of realizing her medical school dreams, she will have to either earn back Bishop’s trust or organize her own dance crew and start over from scratch.

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Andy Hanson (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a finance executive in desperate need of money, convinces his also strapped brother Hank (Ethan Hawke) to rob their parents’ jewelry store. Hank, in turn, hires an acquaintance, Bobby (Brian F. O’Byrne), to help him in the robbery, but the heist goes awry, as Bobby and the brothers’ mother Nanette (Rosemary Harris) fatally shoot each other. Hank has secretly been having an affair with Andy’s wife Gina (Marisa Tomei), while Andy is secretly a drug addict who embezzles to fund his lifestyle. Hank and Andy labor to try to get away with their botched crime, but ultimately their father Charles (Albert Finney) discovers their involvement and tracks them as they make their final desperate moves. In the end, after Andy is shot and Hank flees, Charles visits Andy in the hospital and uses a pillow to suffocate him.

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The movie opens in the fall where after three pregnancy tests in Rollo’s (Rainn Wilson) store, Juno MacGuff (Ellen Page) discovers she is twelve weeks pregnant by her close friend Paulie (Michael Cera). She calls her best friend, Leah (Olivia Thirlby), and decides to schedule an abortion. In front of the clinic, Juno encounters a pro-life classmate protesting, but she enters the clinic nonetheless only to leave after being unnerved by the other patients’ nervous fingers. She returns home intent on carrying the pregnancy to term and to give the infant up for adoption. Juno and Leah look through the penny-saver magazine looking for couples seeking to adopt children and find an ad from a yuppie-couple, Mark and Vanessa Loring (Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner). She breaks the news of her pregnancy to her father Mac MacGuff (J.K. Simmons) and her stepmother, Bren MacGuff (Allison Janney) who both support her decision. Juno and Mac visit the affluent Lorings in their hygienic suburban home where the high-strung and maternalistic Vanessa is put off by Juno’s diffidence and sarcasm but Juno and Mark form a bond over their shared musical interests. Mark reveals that he was once in a punk band but now writes commercial jingles; Juno teases him because Vanessa has restricted all his hobbies – Les Paul guitars, song writing, and comic books – to a single room in the house.

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Benjamin Barker is a barber unfairly sentenced to a life of hard labor by Judge Turpin, who lusted for the man’s beautiful and virtuous wife Lucy and daughter Johanna. Assuming the name Sweeney Todd, he escapes from prison and returns to London, assisted by sailor Anthony Hope. There he is told his wife has poisoned herself and his daughter has become the ward of the villainous judge. The home he once shared with his wife and daughter has now been transformed into the worst pie-shop in London by his departed wife’s former friend, Nellie Lovett, and she takes him in and becomes his sole confidante and co-conspirator in revenge. Not distracted by Mrs. Lovett’s bourgeois ambitions or attempts at seduction, Todd spirals deeper into despair, nihilism, violence and insanity, slitting the throat of most customers who enter his shop. Due to the high price of meat, the bodies of his victims go into Mrs. Lovett’s pies, allowing her shop to finally prosper. The first to fall is Adolfo Pirelli, a rival barber who threatens to expose Todd’s past; his young assistant Toby, who knows nothing of this murder, goes to work for Mrs. Lovett.

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Irishman Gerry Kennedy (Gerard Butler) and Holly (Hilary Swank), are a happily married couple living in Manhattan. When Gerry dies of a brain tumor, Holly is devastated. The grieving young widow and her friends begin to periodically receive letters written by Gerry, each with a task intended to ease Holly out of grief and transition her into a new life.

One “task” is for Holly and her two friends to go on holiday in Ireland, where the couple first met.

At the end of the film it is revealed to Holly and the viewer that when Gerry knew he was going to die he wrote the letters and gave them to Holly’s mother, and that he made her promise to send them one by one to Holly and not tell Holly that she did this.

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This year, Christmas with the whitfields ppromises to be one they will never forget. All the siblings have come home for the first time in years and they’ve bought plenty of baggage with them. As the christmast tree is trimmed and the lights are hung, secrets are revealed and family bonds are tested. As their lives converge, they join together anf help each other discover the true meaning of family

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The film opens with shots of desolate, wide-open country in West Texas in June 1980. In a voiceover, the local sheriff, Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), tells of the changing times as the region has become increasingly violent. Next, Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) escapes police custody by strangling a young officer and steals a car by using a cattle gun to kill the car’s driver.

Meanwhile, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), hunting antelope near the Rio Grande, comes across a collection of corpses and one dying Mexican, the aftermath of a drug deal gone sour. He also finds two million dollars in a suitcase. Moss refuses to help the Mexican, takes the money and leaves, but is later bothered by his conscience and returns with water for the wounded man. During this second visit Moss is ambushed by gunmen and barely escapes with his life, abandoning his car in the process. Moss makes his way to his trailer home, and plans to put his wife Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald) on a bus to stay at her mother’s home until the conflict is resolved.

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Lyra Belacqua (Richards) is a young orphan girl who lives in a parallel universe in which a person’s soul resides outside the body in the form of an animal called a “daemon.” The land is controlled by the Magisterium, an authoritarian organisation which restricts freedoms in order to impose its own systems of belief upon the populace. A ward of Jordan College, Lyra spends her free time with the local children and her best friend, Roger (Walker). Lyra and the others tell of the “Gobblers,” who they hold responsible for the disappearance of several local children.

When Lyra’s uncle, Lord Asriel (Craig), visits the college, Lyra saves him from assassination at the hands of a Magisterial representative, who wants to prevent Asriel from presenting evidence to the college which indicates the existence of particles called “Dust,” in opposition to official Magisterium doctrine. Asriel obtains funding from the college to mount an expedition to the far north in order to investigate the substance, which he believes originates in a parallel universe to his own, entering the body via a person’s dæmon. Fearing the effects of Dust, the Magisterium is conducting experiments on children in order to find a means of inoculating them against it.

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