Movies Released April 21, 2017

In the spring of 1997, several residents of Phoenix, Arizona claimed to witness mysterious lights in the sky. This phenomenon, which became known as "The Phoenix Lights," remains the most famous UFO sighting in American history. On July 23, 1997, three high school student filmmakers went missing while camping in the desert outside Phoenix. The purpose of their trip was to document their investigation into the Phoenix Lights. They were never seen again. Twenty years later, Sarah Bishop, a documentary filmmaker and younger sibling of one of the missing, returns to Phoenix to delve into the their disappearances and the emotional trauma left on those that knew them. Nothing can prepare her for the shocking discovery of a tape from the night her brother and his friends disappeared.

Set in 1914 as the Great War looms, the vast Ottoman Empire is crumbling. Constantinople, the once-vibrant multicultural capital on the shores of the Bosphorus, is about to be consumed by chaos. Michael Boghosian (Isaac) arrives in the cosmopolitan hub as a medical student determined to bring modern medicine back to Siroun, his ancestral village in Southern Turkey where Turkish Muslims and Armenian Christians have lived side by side for centuries. Photojournalist Chris Myers (Bale) has come here only partly to cover geo-politics. He is mesmerized by his love for Ana (le Bon), an Armenian artist he has accompanied from Paris after the sudden death of her father.

When Michael meets Ana, their shared Armenian heritage sparks an attraction that explodes into a romantic rivalry between the two men. As the Turks form an alliance with Germany and the Empire turns violently against its own ethnic minorities, their conflicting passions must be deferred while they join forces to survive even as events threaten to overwhelm them.

Set in Iraq in 2003, Sand Castle follows a group of American soldiers in the early days of the second Gulf War. Bearing witness to the heat and the horror is the inexperienced Private Matt Ocre (Nicholas Hoult), who together with several fellow soldiers is ordered to the outskirts of Baqubah to repair a water pumping station damaged by U.S. bombs. But as Ocre discovers, in an atmosphere where resentment and anger fester, trying to win the hearts and minds of the locals is a task fraught with danger. It's here, in the streets, squares and schools that he discovers the true cost of war.

The pampered life of Ozzy, a lovable beagle, is turned upside down when his family leaves him in what seems to be the best canine spa, Blue Creek, before going on a long vacation. But the place’s perfect appearance turns out to be a façade concocted by its villainous owner, Mr. Robbins. Ozzy soon discovers that Blue Creek is a jail for dogs, inhabited mainly by tough street mongrels and where it’s a case of survival of the fittest. Ozzy will now have to avoid danger, find strength where he didn’t think he had any and learn to rely on Chester, Fronky and Doc, his new friends who will accompany him on his adventure as he tries to get back home safe and sound.

Citizen Jane: Battle for the City is a story about our global urban future, in which nearly three-fourths of the world’s population will live in cities by the end of this century. It’s also a story about America’s recent urban past, in which bureaucratic, “top down” approaches to building cities have dramatically clashed with grassroots, “bottom up” approaches. The film brings us back mid-century, on the eve of the battles for the heart and soul of American cities, about to be routed by cataclysmically destructive Urban Renewal and highway projects.

The film details the revolutionary thinking of Jane Jacobs, and the origins of her magisterial 1961 treatise The Death and Life of Great American Cities, in which she singlehandedly undercuts her era’s orthodox model of city planning, exemplified by the massive Urban Renewal projects of New York’s “Master Builder,” Robert Moses. Jacobs and Moses figure centrally in our story as archetypes of the “bottom up” and the “top down” vision for cities.

They also figure as two larger-than-life personalities: Jacobs—a journalist with provincial origins, no formal training in city planning, and scarce institutional authority—seems at first glance to share little in common with Robert Moses, the upper class, high prince of government and urban theory fully ensconced in New York’s halls of power and privilege. Yet both reveal themselves to be master tacticians who, in the middle of the 20th century, became locked in an epic struggle over the fate of the city.

The bourgeois and extremely eccentric Van Peteghem family—among them Juliette Binoche, Fabrice Luchini, and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi—have settled in for another summer at their cliff-top villa overlooking the picturesque Slack Bay. Their leisurely rhythm of sunbathing and seaside constitutionals is soon interrupted by the arrival of two bumbling inspectors investigating a string of tourists gone missing (and serving full-on Keystone Kops). As the macabre mysteries mount and love blossoms between the family’s genderqueer teen and the son of a local fisherman, Binoche and company ratchet the slapstick up to eleven.

After Venya’s mother receives a call from school reporting her son’s refusal to participate in mixed swimming lessons, she first suspects her teenager of being shy and derides his claim that it is “against his religion.” As Venya is finally exempted by the school’s devout principal, he grows confident that his strict and rigorous study of the Bible gives him the ability to manipulate all forms of authority. Challenged by a teacher who refuses to consent to his dogma, he sets out to eliminate her and subdue an entire community. At a time when arguments over the teaching of religion in public schools are prominent in the media, this wildly escalating classroom drama—based on a play by German playwright Marius von Mayenburg—serves as a frightening cautionary tale.

In 2012, “Nature” published a study led by more than 20 researchers from the top scientific institutions in the world predicting that humankind could disappear between 2040 and 2100. It also said that it could be avoided by drastically changing our way of life and take appropriate measures.

Shortly after giving birth to her first child, French actress and director Mélanie Laurent became increasingly aware of the dangers and the state of urgency that her son will face in the future. Along with friend and activist Cyril Dion and their crew, she decided to travel the world in search of solutions that can help save the next generations. The result is Tomorrow, an inspiring documentary that presents concrete solutions implemented throughout the world by hundred of communities.