New Movies Released December 9th, 2011
Ratings and Trailers Courtesy of Movieweb
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New Years Eve
Director/producer Garry Marshall is joined by a stellar ensemble cast to ring in the 2011 holiday season with the romantic comedy “New Year’s Eve.”
“New Year’s Eve” celebrates love, hope, forgiveness, second chances and fresh starts, with intertwining stories told amidst the pulse and promise of New York City on the most dazzling night of the year.
The film’s all-star cast includes Academy Award® winner Halle Berry, Jessica Biel, Jon Bon Jovi, Academy Award® nominee Abigail Breslin, Chris “Ludacris” Bridges, two-time Academy Award® winner Robert De Niro, Josh Duhamel, Zac Efron, Hector Elizondo, Katherine Heigl, Ashton Kutcher, Seth Meyers, Lea Michele, Sarah Jessica Parker, Academy Award® nominee Michelle Pfeiffer, Til Schweiger, two-time Academy Award® winner Hilary Swank and Sofia Vergara.
Reuniting with Marshall from last year’s hit romantic comedy “Valentine’s Day” are screenwriter Katherine Fugate and producers Mike Karz and Wayne Rice. Serving as executive producers are Toby Emmerich, Samuel J. Brown, Michael Disco, Josie Rosen and Diana Pokorny, with Heather Hall as co-producer.
The behind-the-scenes creative filmmaking team includes director of photography Charles Minsky, production designer Mark Friedberg, editor Michael Tronick, Oscar®-nominated costume designer Gary Jones and Oscar®-nominated composer John Debney.
5 Stars
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I Melt With You
Richard (Thomas Jane), Ron (Jeremy Piven), Jonathan (Rob Lowe) and Tim (Christian McKay) are old college friends that gather annually for a week in Big Sur to celebrate their friendship and catch-up on each other’s lives. They seem like typical men in their forties – all with careers, families, and enormous responsibilities – but like most people there is a lot more beneath the surface.
As the week progresses, they go down the rabbit hole of excess as mountains of drugs are consumed to a blaring rock ‘n’ roll soundtrack. Parties with much younger women spin out of control. Exhausted and run ragged, they bare their souls to one another revealing the disillusionment with their lives. As the truth emerges, the reunion takes a much darker turn when a promise from their past is brought to light. From director Mark Pellington, I Melt With You is a visually dazzling, wild and wooly trip deep into the male psyche, driven by four amazingly committed and profound performances.
5 Stars
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The Sitter
Jonah Hill has a wild night to remember when he agrees to babysit three challenging kids.
5 Stars
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We Need To Talk About Kevin
A suspenseful and gripping psychological thriller, Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin explores the factious relationship between a mother and her son. Tilda Swinton, in a bracing, tour-de-force performance, plays the mother, Eva, as she contends for 15 years with the increasing malevolence of her first-born child, Kevin (Ezra Miller).
Based on the best-selling novel of the same name, We Need to Talk About Kevin explores nature vs. nurture on a whole new level as Eva’s own culpability is measured against Kevin’s innate evilness. Ramsay’s masterful storytelling simultaneously combines a provocative moral ambiguity with a satisfying andcompelling narrative, which builds to a chilling, unforgettable climax
5 Stars
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Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
An intelligence officer is recalled from retirement when there are signs that one of the top-ranking officers of the British Secret Intelligence Service is a Soviet mole.
4.5 Stars
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Young Adult
Academy Award(R) winner Charlize Theron plays Mavis Gary, a writer of teen literature who returns to her small hometown to relive her glory days and attempt to reclaim her happily married high school sweetheart (Patrick Wilson). When returning home proves more difficult than she thought, Mavis forms an unusual bond with a former classmate (Patton Oswalt) who hasn’t quite gotten over high school, either.
4 Stars
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W.E.
Two love stories, one historic and one contemporary, are interwoven. The famous romance between King Edward VIII and American divorcée Wallis Simpson is juxtaposed with the affair of a Russian security guard with a New York trophy wife Wally Winstrhop. Wally is obsessed with the story of Edward and the woman he loved, and embarks on her own research of their life together, even attending the Sotheby’s auction of the Windsor Estate. She comes to see that their relationship, although glamorous, was not the perfect one that she had imagined it to be.
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Knuckle
James Quinn McDonagh and Paddy “The Lurcher” Joyce. Names that demand attention. Men related by blood but separated by a feud that dates back generations. As the heads of rival families, they train to represent their feuding Irish travelling clans, in their long-standing history of violent bare-knuckle boxing.
With Knuckle, filmmaker Ian Palmer presents a hard-edged portrait of Irish Traveller male culture and explores the bond of loyalty, the need for revenge, and the pressures to fight for the honor of your family name.
Irish Travellers are normally silent about certain parts of their lifestyle and this is a rare chance to step inside one of the world’s most vibrant and elusive communities. Never before has such a portrayal of their fighting traditions been committed to film as Palmer spent years around the clans before they agreed to shoot their secretive world and their way of settling scores: no gloves, no padding, just Knuckle.
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London River
Set against the backdrop of the July 7, 2005 terrorist attacks in London, London River follows Elizabeth (BAFTA winner, Academy Award® nominee Brenda Blethyn) from a small farming community in Guernsey, as she travels to London in the immediate aftermath of the bombings after failing to hear from her daughter. Elizabeth is disturbed by the confusion of the metropolis and above all by the predominantly Muslim neighborhood where her daughter lived. Her fear and prejudice escalate when she discovers her daughter was converting to Islam and she keeps crossing paths with Ousmane (Silver Bear winner, Sotigui Kouyaté), a West African who has come from France to find his missing son. Although they come from very different backgrounds, Elizabeth and Ousmane share the same hope of finding their children alive. Putting aside their cultural differences, they give each other the strength to continue the search and maintain their faith in humanity.
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My Piece of The Pie
Writer/director Cédric Klapisch (L’auberge Espagnole) returns with the energetic and insightful My Piece of the Pie, a contemporary drama with a comedic edge, a timely social bent, and a surprising twist. Actress Karin Viard (Time Out, Avenue Montaigne) is mesmerizing as fiery single mother France, a blue-collar worker who loses her job when the local factory in her French seaside town closes down. Faced with having to support her three children, with no job prospects in sight, France enrolls herself in a housekeeper training program and lands a position cleaning the Paris apartment of handsome but cocky power broker Steve (Gilles Lellouche, Mesrine, Point Blank). France strikes more gold as the perpetual bachelor also hires her to watch his son for a few weeks. Being a part of the millionaire lifestyle, however servient, is not so bad. But what really lies behind Steve’s bullish business ways and brash demeanor? Is he as innocent as France would like him to be? Is she?
Boldly intertwining the theme of personal accountability in today’s money-driven world and a witty odd-couple story, Klapisch steadily unravels how seemingly harmless decisions in business and in life have broader consequences than what one would ever imagine.
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1961 – Tanzania’s location on the East African coast made it penetrable to Arab and slave traders, who operated in this area most frequently in the fourteenth century. French interest in the economic possibilities of the region was sparked towards the mid-eighteenth century, but the first established European interest came in the form of missionaries from the German Church Missionary Society. East Africa was seen as an opportunity for German colonial expansion and by the late nineteenth century, an area including Tanzania had become known as German East Africa. German methods of colonial administration were met with fierce local resistance but control was briefly established until the outbreak of World War One. Following Germany’s defeat, Britain administered the region which it renamed the Tanganyika region. 
1992 – US troops have arrived in Somalia in a bid to aid thousands of starving locals. The American marines landed just before dawn. Their mission is to spearhead the arrival of 35,000 troops from a dozen countries assembled as part of a US led multi-national operation to crack down on looting and extortion that has prevented food getting through. American forces were expecting to tackle hostile gunmen who have been holding the famine-stricken country to ransom in a conflict which has seen around 300,000 people killed in the last year ever since dictator Mohamed Siad Barre was ousted and local warlords took over. But instead of fierce fighting, the marines were greeted by the world’s media. The first group of six to eight navy frogmen in Operation Restore Hope, came out of the sea on to the beach outside the Somali capital, Mogadishu under a full moon. Later, three rubber boats came ashore and around 24 troops walked up through the dunes into the glare of television lights. US Marines in armoured amphibious tractors from the USS Juneau then set about establishing beachheads for further arrivals of around 1,800 troops. 
