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Dark Matter |
The feature film debut of renowned opera and theater director Chen Shi-Zheng, Dark Matter delves into the world of Liu Xing (Chinese for 'Shooting Star'), a Chinese science student pursuing a Ph.D. in the United States in the early 1990s. Driven by ambition, yet unable to navigate academic politics, Liu Xing is inexorably pushed to the margins of American life, until he loses his way.
Liu Xing (Liu Ye) arrives at a big Western university with plans to study the origins of the universe. ...
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The feature film debut of renowned opera and theater director Chen Shi-Zheng, Dark Matter delves into the world of Liu Xing (Chinese for 'Shooting Star'), a Chinese science student pursuing a Ph.D. in the United States in the early 1990s. Driven by ambition, yet unable to navigate academic politics, Liu Xing is inexorably pushed to the margins of American life, until he loses his way.
Liu Xing (Liu Ye) arrives at a big Western university with plans to study the origins of the universe. At first, his experience is a heady rush of expectation and optimism. He finds other Chinese students to share a cheap apartment with him, and flirts with an attractive American girl who works in a local tea shop. When the head of the department, Jacob Reiser (Aidan Quinn), welcomes Liu Xing into his select cosmology group, it seems that only hard work stands between him and a bright future in American science. At an orientation for foreigners sponsored by a local church, Joanna Silver (Meryl Streep), a wealthy patron of the university, notices the earnest student. An unspoken bond forms between them.
Liu Xing becomes Reiser's protg, accompanying him to a prestigious conference where he makes an impressive debut. He is drawn to the study of dark matter, an unseen substance that shapes the universe, but it soon becomes clear that his developing theories threaten Reiser's conflicting theories and well-established studies. Excited by the possibility of a breakthrough, Liu Xing is deaf to warnings that he must first pay his dues. When he is eclipsed within the department by Laurence, a more dutiful Chinese student, Liu Xing is forced to go behind Reiser's back to publish his discoveries. When the article draws ire instead of accolades, he turns to Joanna, who naively encourages him on his collision course.
Liu Xing clings to the idea of American science as a free market of ideas, and American society as wide open to immigrants. But in the end, his dissertation is rejected, and the girl in the tea shop brushes him off. His roommates find jobs, leaving him behind. Too proud to accept help from Joanna, and unwilling to return home to his parents, Liu Xing becomes a ghost-like presence at the university. Left alone with his shattered dreams, he explodes in a final act of violence.
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The Exonerated |
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Sixteen years. Imagine everything you could do with sixteen years. Imagine everything you did the last sixteen years. Now take it all away.
Sunny Jacobs was convicted and sentenced to death for a crime she did not commit. Sixteen years was just the beginning of what was taken from Sunny Jacobs.
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Synopsis and Movie Reviews
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Convicted |
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The lawyer of a convicted murderer facing the death penalty may have found evidence that proves his client is innocent. Now, he must race against the clock to save wrongly convicted woman.
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Synopsis and Movie Reviews
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Evelyn |
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Set in 1953 Dublin, Desmond Doyle is fighting to win custody of his three children after his wife left him for another man and then left the country. His fight overturns one of Ireland's longest-standing family-court laws.
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Synopsis and Movie Reviews
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Songcatcher |
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In the Appalachian mountains of 1907, a musicologist arrives to record the Scottish and Irish folksongs that the locals have preserved for generations. She soon finds herself getting involved in other ways, including helping them with their struggles with the coal mining companies, and falling in love with a rough local musician, Tom.
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Synopsis and Movie Reviews
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Box Office Results Jan 29th
