Video blog

Elspeth McGillicuddy, an old friend of Miss Marple’s, witnesses a strangulation murder in a passing train through the window of her coach compartment. When Police Inspector Slack can’t find a body along the tracks and doubts the validity of the story, Miss Marple and Elspeth locate the area where the body was probably thrown from the train, the isolated manor house of an aged, cantankerous millionaire, Luther Crackenthorpe. Miss Marple’s niece Lucy is recruited to apply for a job on the estate in hopes of locating the corpse. When she finds it in an ancient sarcophagus in an outbuilding housing Egyptian and Etruscan art treasures, the police and Miss Marple are brought in. Obviously someone in the large household is involved, but who?

Earl Brooks is a highly respected businessman and was recently named Portland’s Man of the Year. He hides a terrible secret however: he is a serial killer known as the Fingerprint Killer. He has been attending AA meetings and has kept his addiction to killing under control for two years now but his alter ego, Marshall, has re-appeared and is pushing him to kill again. When he does kill a couple while they are making love, he is seen and photographed by someone who also his own death and murder fetish. In a parallel story, the police detective investigating the murder is having problems of her own. She is going through a messy divorce and a violent criminal who had vowed revenge some years before has escaped from prison and is after her.

After finding himself at the constant abuse of his best friend Bobby, Marty has become fed up with his friend’s twisted ways. His girlfriend, a victim of Bobby’s often cruel ways, couldn’t agree more and they strategize murdering Bobby, with a group of willing and unwilling participants in a small Florida town. In the midst of their plotting, they find themselves contemplating with the possible aftermath of what could happen.

Not all Christmas stories are full of cheer - take the disturbing childhood of Billy Lenz, for example. Born during Christmas, little Billy Lenz suffered from Jaundice because of a liver defect, and was unwanted by his cruel mother (who only saw the husband she’d come to despise when she looked at her son). While she let her true feelings be known to him with beatings and abuse, only his father showed him compassion like a parent should. But on Christmas Eve in 1975, his unfaithful mother gave him one of the most cruelest gifts of all, as she made five-year-old Billy observe his beloved father’s brutal murder at her own hands and those of her lover with a claw hammer. Before burying him under the house, she locked Billy in the attic for good, to hold his silence of what he’d witnessed that night. His only contact from then on was when she came to punish him for making a noise or other such trivial nuisances, while she was with her lover and starting a “new” family. As Billy’s mother fell pregnant with a daughter and treated her with love, which Billy had never experienced with his mother, Billy came out of the attic on Christmas Eve 1991, taking a rolling pin to his mother’s head, and a pointed tree ornament to her lovers eye before leaving his sister as disfigured as he was by blinding her. Before he could finish the job police forced there way in and dragged him off to mental institution and his sister a foster home, whose eye sight was saved in one eye… but not the other. Cut to the present where a security guard has been monitoring Billy’s progress since he came into his care, back in 1991. Knowing full well that during this time for fifteen years, Billy has made a break from this asylum, but never succeeding… until now. Far away, his childhood home is now a sorority house, where nine sisters and their house-mother are celebrating the holiday season together …but tonight they’re about to get a surprise visitor… and it’s not Santa.

Stewart Kane, an Irishman living in the Australian town of Jindabyne, is on a fishing trip in isolated hill country with three other men when they discover the body of a murdered girl in the river. Rather than return to the town immediately, they continue fishing and report their gruesome find days later. Stewart’s wife Claire is the last to find out. Deeply disturbed by her husband’s action, her faith in her relationship with Stewart is shaken to the core. She wants to understand and tries to make things right. In her determination to help the victim’s family Claire sets herself not only against her own family and friends but also those of the dead girl. Her marriage is taken to the brink and her peaceful life with Stewart and their young son hangs in the balance. The story of a murder and a marriage. A powerful and original film about the things that haunt us.

Aubrey Fleming is a regular high school student with friends and family. One night, she unexpectedly disappears. Two weeks later she is found unconscious in the middle of the woods. When spoken to, her loved ones realize she has forgotten her identity and the personality living in her body is Dakota Moss, a character that Aubrey created in one of her stories for an English assignment. Dakota denies ever being Aubrey knowing that they look identical. Now, Dakota must try to unravel the mystery of how her and Aubrey co-exist and find out who abducted Aubrey that night.

After eliminating General Zod & the other Kryptonian arch-villains, Ursa & Non, Superman leaves Earth to try to find his former home world of Krypton after astronomers have supposedly found it. When he finds nothing but remnants, he returns home to Earth - to find out that Lois Lane is engaged to a relative of his boss, and that Lex Luthor is at it again - after swindling an elderly, terminally ill woman. The psychopathic Luthor, whose plans to destroy California failed because of Superman’s heroics, vows vengeance against the Man of Steel and contrives a new sinister plot - using the crystals of Krypton to build a continent that will wipe out most of North America! Embedded in the continent’s structure is Kryptonite - the lethal substance that is Superman’s only weakness. Upon learning of Luthro’s sinister scheme, Superman must again race against time to stop the psychopathic Luthor before millions - possibly billions - are killed.

Sydney Schanberg is a New York Times journalist convering the civil war in Cambodia. Together with local representative Dith Pran, they cover some of the tragedy and madness of the war. When the Americans forces leave, Dith Pran sends his family with them, but stays behind himself to help Schanberg cover the event. As an American, Schanberg won’t have any trouble leaving the country, but the situation is different for Pran; he’s a local, and the Khmer Rouge are moving in.

‘Moisés Kaufman’ (qv) and members of New York’s Tectonic Theater Project went to Laramie, Wyoming after the murder of ‘Matthew Shepard (I)’ (qv). This is a film version of the play they wrote based on more than 200 interviews they conducted in Laramie. It follows and in some cases re-enacts the chronology of Shepherd’s visit to a local bar, his kidnap and beating, the discovery of him tied to a fence, the vigil at the hospital, his death and funeral, and the trial of his killers. It mixes real news reports with actors portraying friends, family, cops, killers, and other Laramie residents in their own words. It concludes with a Laramie staging of “Angels in America” a year after Shephard’s death.

Strangers from all different walks of life: a limo driver escorting a movie star, parents with a young son, a cop transporting a convict, a prostitute, a young couple, and a motel manager are caught up in a nasty rainstorm, stuck at a motel in desolate Nevada. Soon they realize they may be at the motel for another reason when one by one, people start getting killed off. As tensions flare and fingers are pointed, they have to get to the bottom of why they’re there. Meanwhile in an undisclosed location, a psychiatrist is trying to prove the innocence of a man accused of murder in an eleventh hour trial. How these two through-lines are related can only be found in Identity.