Simone

Viktor Taransky (Al Pacino) is a top Hollywood director who has fallen on hard times.

His temperamental female lead (Winona Ryder) has walked off his movie Sunrise, Sunset, and dashed his dreams of making a comeback.

The crowning insult is when Taransky is fired by his ex-wife and studio head (Catherine Keener).

Just then, computer whiz Hank Aleno (Elias Koteas) comes to Taransky’s rescue with an outlandish scheme for digitally creating an actress to substitute for the star.

Taransky initially rebuffs Hank’s insane proposal, but curiosity gets the better of him and he tries out Hank’s simulation software.

Just a few key strokes and an overnight sensation is born. “Simone”, the cyber-actress, is so good that everyone thinks that she is a real person.

Andrew Niccol’s film is an amusing and quirky satire on the Hollywood world of celebrity and artificiality, and Al Pacino is in particularly good form.

Trapped

Two crooks, Joe and Cheryl Hickey (Kevin Bacon and Courtney Love), have perfected a foolproof plan for kidnapping children from wealthy couples in exchange for hefty ransoms.

They have already succeeded in four such abductions, and are preparing for a fifth.

When a young Mississippi physician Will Jennings (Stuart Townsend) leaves for a medical conference in Seattle, his wife Karen (Charlize Theron) and six-year-old daughter Abby (Dakota Fanning) return home, but within minutes their comfortable lives are shattered.

Abby is kidnapped. Her plight is critical because she is diabetic and will die if she does not have her insulin.

Her parents have only 24 hours to pay for their daughter’s safe return. And if they tell anyone, their daughter will be killed.

In this dramatic and suspenseful thriller, the desperate parents seize the initiative and turn the tables on their tormentors.

The Hours

Based on the Pulitzer-prize-winning novel by Michael Cunningham, The Hours uses Virginia Woolf’s classic novel and central character, Mrs Dalloway, as its theme and inspiration.

Nicole Kidman – virtually unrecognizable in her make-up – plays tormented English writer Virginia Woolf whose ongoing battle with mental illness eventually led to her tragic suicide in 1941. Critics are acclaiming Kidman’s role as one of the finest in her outstanding career.

The film begins dramatically with the moment of Woolf’s suicide and flashes back across her life and work as she develops her most memorable character, Clarissa Dalloway, in 1923.

The film depicts three parallel lives of three different eras – Virginia Woolf in the 1920s, and two other women, Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) in 1950s California suburbia, and Clarissa Vaughn (Meryl Streep) in modern-day Manhattan. The women are joined by their common experience of depression, alienation and the search for love.

Maid in Manhattan

Marisa Ventura (Jennifer Lopez) is a hard-working, intelligent single mother who dreams of a better life for herself and her 10-year-old son, Ty (Tyler Garcia Posey).

She struggles to make ends meet as a maid at Manhattan’s first-class Beresford Hotel.

While working there, she falls in love with Christopher Marshall (Ralph Fiennes), an aspiring US senator and one of Manhattan’s most eligible bachelors.

In this comedy of errors, Marshall mistakenly assumes that Marisa is a socialite guest at the hotel.

Lopez and Fiennes rise to the occasion with stellar performances in this Cinderella-style fairy-tale romance.

Swimming Upstream

Swimming Upstream is a powerful and inspirational film based on the true story of Tony Fingleton, a young man from a troubled family who found the inner strength to become a sporting champion.

Set in 1950s Brisbane, Tony (Jesse Spencer) beats the odds to become a champion swimmer in spite of an overbearing alcoholic father Harold (Geoffrey Rush), and his long-suffering but quietly heroic wife Dora (Judy Davis).

Overshadowed in his father’s eyes by his physically gifted brothers, Tony has always felt inadequate.

It is only when Tony displays a precocious swimming talent that he feels he has a hope of winning his father’s affection and maybe even Olympic gold.

But this hope is short lived as his father overlooks him in favour of his younger brother.

Despite this setback and his father’s destructive alcoholic benders, Tony’s career flourishes.