Movies Released December 13, 2013

It takes 14 years for Walt Disney to persuade Australian author P.L. Travers to sell him the rights to make a film out of Mary Poppins. Travers is extremely reluctant because the story is highly personal, and reflects hardships in her own life and her relationship with her father, who died when she was seven years old.

The epic rivalry between half-pipe legends Kevin Pearce and Shaun White is documented in this exhilarating ride into the world of extreme snowboarding. With both practicing more and more breathtaking and dangerous tricks leading up to the Vancouver Winter Olympics, everything suddenly changes for Kevin when a horrific crash leaves him fighting for his life. When he recovers, all he wants to do is get on his snowboard again, even though medics and family fear it could kill him.

Francisco Barreiro and Laura Caro play parents Felix and Sol whose preteen son and daughter inexplicably reappear after being lost overnight on a desolate, cave-riddled mountainside after a casual hike became every parent’s nightmare. The good luck and good fortune of their return soon changes, as the children’s behavior suggests ominous and unspeakable events the night the children were lost that continue even now. As a loving couple – and loving parents – try to care for and protect their children, the ancient and half-whispered legends around the caves and the mountain and those who have gone there before become too strange to believe … and too dangerous, no matter how insane, to ignore.

1975. In Rome, Claude Lanzmann filmed a series of interviews with Benjamin Murmelstein, the last President of the Jewish Council in the Theresienstadt ghetto in Czechoslovakia, the only "Elder of the Jews" not to have been killed during the war. A rabbi in Vienna, following the annexation of Austria by Germany in 1938, Murmelstein fought bitterly with Adolf Eichmann, week after week for seven years, managing to help around 121,000 Jews leave the country, and preventing the liquidation of the ghetto.

2012. Claude Lanzmann, at 87 – without masking anything of the passage of time on men, but showing the incredible permanence of the locations involved –exhumes these interviews shot in Rome, returning to Theresienstadt, the town “given to the Jews by Hitler”, a so-called model ghetto, but a ghetto of deceit chosen by Adolf Eichmann to dupe the world. We discover the extraordinary personality of Benjamin Murmelstein: a man blessed with a dazzling intelligence and a true courage, which, along with an unrivaled memory, makes him a wonderfully wry, sardonic and authentic storyteller.

Through these three periods, from Nisko in Poland to Theresienstadt, and from Vienna to Rome, the film provides an unprecedented insight into the genesis of the Final Solution. It reveals the true face of Eichmann, and exposes without artifice the savage contradictions of the Jewish Councils.

Some Velvet Morning centers on Fred (Stanley Tucci), who arrives on the doorstep of his beautiful young mistress, Velvet (Alice Eve), after four years apart, claiming to have left his wife. But when she rejects his attempts at rekindling their romance, his persistence evolves into obsession -- and a dark history between the ex-lovers comes into focus.

Set in New Orleans, Hours revolves around Nolan (Walker) as his beloved wife dies during childbirth, leaving him to care for their newborn on his own. As Nolan struggles to come to grips with his loss, Hurricane Katrina simultaneously devastates the coast of Louisiana. After the hospital is evacuated, Nolan alone must fight to keep his daughter alive – amid violent conditions and armed looters. When an electricity shortage threatens to disrupt his child’s incubator, Nolan will have to race against time in order to save his child from the raging storm.