Together

Together is an unabashed tearjerker, directed by China’s multi-award-winning director Chen Kaige.

Don’t be put off by Together being a “foreign” film. This is a sumptuously produced, heartfelt story dealing with universal themes and featuring an extraordinary classical soundtrack.

Xiaochun is a shy 13-year-old violin prodigy who lives with his uneducated peasant father, Liu Cheng, in the picturesque canal city of Suzhou (near Shanghai).

Liu Cheng believes that all it will take for his son to achieve fame and fortune is to get him a master teacher. With their meagre savings father and son head for bustling Beijing.

In this exciting new world, Xiaochun studies under demanding teachers and is introduced to the cutthroat world of professional music.

The film can be seen as a portrait of the old and new China, as symbolized by two of Xiaochun’s teachers. Professor Jiang is scruffy and chaotic but dedicated to music for art’s sake, while Professor Yu trains the biggest classical music stars in the country and launches them on glittering careers.

When Xiaochun is forced to decide whether to leave his father and live with Professor Yu, his choice is essentially whether to leave an older, more human China, and enter a modern, increasingly Westernised world of ambition, success and media marketing.

At its core, Together is a touching story about family love and devotion. Xiaochun is torn between his love for his father, who is willing to sacrifice everything for him, and the realisation of his own ambitions and dreams.

Once Upon a Time in the Midlands

Set in the modern English Midlands – but done in the style of a “spaghetti” Western – this film is a comedy about blended families.

Small-town crook Jimmy (Robert Carlyle) returns to his hometown to try to win back the heart of the ex-girlfriend he walked out on years ago.

His ex-girlfriend Shirley (Shirley Henderson) lives with her daughter Markene (Finn Atkins) and a new boyfriend, the lovable nerdish Dek (Rhys Ifans) in a makeshift but happy household.

Their next-door neighbours are Jimmy’s sister Carol (Kathy Burke), her cowboy husband (Ricky Tomlinson), with children from both their present and previous marriages.

Jimmy throws a spanner in the works when he returns to town, accompanied by a gang of Scottish thugs.

Freaky Friday

A tomboy teenage girl, Anna (Lindsay Lohan), and her widowed mother, Tess Coleman (Jamie Lee Curtis), fight like cat and dog, in this hilarious remake of the 1976 film starring a young Jodie Foster.

Tess is a psychiatrist, juggling her job and family while planning her second marriage. Her daughter Anna, a rebellious rocker, thoroughly disapproves of her mother’s wedding plans.

After a particularly bitter argument one evening, mother and daughter wake up the next morning to find that they have magically swapped bodies and will have to live each other’s lives for the day.

Anna (in her mother’s body) goes for a spin on the back of her boyfriend’s motorcycle and gives her mother a makeover.

Tess (in her daughter’s body) has to play a guitar in a band audition and has some fun standing up to a high school teacher.

Jamie Lee Curtis is in fine form as she slouches, pouts, curses and flirts like a teen.

28 Days Later

From British director Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, Shallow Grave, The Beach) comes a heart-stopping science fiction thriller.

In a medical research facility, caged chimps are chained before banks of screens displaying horrifically violent images. They are part of an experiment to help scientists develop a Valium-like tranquiliser to suppress anger.

A group of animal-rights activists breaks into the research facility. Ignoring the warnings of a terrified researcher that the chimps are “infected”, the activists proceed to free the animals and are immediately attacked by the enraged creatures.

A terrifying virus that can infect humans and drive them into a permanent state of murderous rage is thereby released.

Twenty-eight days later, cycle courier Jim (Cillian Murphy) awakes from a coma to find himself in a deserted intensive care unit of a London hospital.

Mystified, he wanders through the empty city streets of London to discover that Britain has been overrun by the deadly virus.

The virus taps into the modern phenomenon of social rage. It is uncontrollable precisely because it triggers something that is deep within each of us.

Jim searches for other uninfected survivors.

Matchstick Men

Roy (Nicolas Cage) and Frank (Sam Rockwell, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind) are a couple of con artists – otherwise known as grifters or matchstick men – in this clever comedy directed by Ridley Scott (Gladiator, Black Hawk Down).

Roy, a veteran con, and Frank, his ambitious protégé, palm off bargain-basement “water filtration systems” on unsuspecting people who pay 10 times their value in the hope of winning bogus prizes like cars, jewellery and overseas vacations… which, of course, never eventuate.

Roy’s private life, however, is not so successful. He is a chain-smoking loner, suffering from agoraphobia (fear of open spaces) and obsessive-compulsive routines. He finds it necessary all the time to wipe germs off the doorknob, sterilize the phone, and fold his underwear and socks in neat little stacks.

With his personality disorders seriously threatening his criminal productivity, he is forced to seek the help of a psychiatrist (Bruce Altman), just to keep him functioning.

But Roy gets more than he bargains for. He is told that he has a teenage daughter, Angela (Alison Lohman, White Oleander) – a child whose existence he suspected but never dared confirm.

Her arrival in his life disrupts his carefully ordered routine.

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