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THE READER opens in post-WWII Germany when teenager Michael Berg becomes ill and is helped home by Hanna, a stranger twice his age. Michael recovers from scarlet fever and seeks out Hanna to thank her. The two are quickly drawn into a passionate but secretive affair. Michael discovers that Hanna loves being read to and their physical relationship deepens. Hanna is enthralled as Michael reads to her from “The Odyssey”, "Huck Finn", and “The Lady with the Little Dog.” Despite their intense bond, Hanna mysteriously disappears one day and Michael is left confused and heartbroken. Eight years later, while Michael is a law student observing the Nazi war crime trials, he is stunned to find Hanna back in his life - this time as a defendant in the courtroom. As Hanna’s past is revealed, Michael uncovers a deep secret that will impact both of their lives. THE READER is a haunting story about truth and reconciliation, about how one generation comes to terms with the crimes of another.

Steven Soderbergh’s The Argentine stars Benicio Del Toro as Che Guevara. The film opens with Che as one of the important figures in the growing Cuban rebellion led by Fidel Castro (Demian Bichir). The movie charts how the two successfully built an underground army large enough to successfully overthrow the government of Fulgencio Batista. Soderbergh and Del Toro also team up again for a second biopic of Guevara titled Guerrilla, a movie that focuses on his life in the years after the Cuban revolution.

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is a fictional story that offers a unique perspective on how prejudice, hatred and violence affect innocent people, particularly children, during wartime. Through the lens of an nine-year-old boy largely shielded from the reality of World War II, we witness a forbidden friendship that forms between Bruno, the son of Nazi commandant, and Schmuel, a Jewish boy held captive in a concentration camp. Though the two are separated physically by a barbed wire fence, their lives become inescapably intertwined. The imagined story of Bruno and Shmuel sheds light on the brutality, senselessness and devastating consequences of war from an unusual point of view. Together, their tragic journey helps recall the millions of innocent victims of the Holocaust.

Lady Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman) travels from England to northern Australia to force her husband to sell a cattle station. Her husband is murdered shortly before she arrives, with suspicions that he was killed by an Aboriginal elder, “King George” (David Gulpilil). The actual murderer is a white man, Neil Fletcher (David Wenham), trying to gain control of Ashley’s cattle station “Faraway Downs”, so that Lesley ‘King’ Carney (Bryan Brown) can have a cattle monopoly in the Northern Territory, which will give him negotiating leverage with an Australian army officer, Captain Dutton (Ben Mendelsohn). The childless Lady Ashley is captivated by a young half-caste boy, Nullah (from an Aboriginal mother and a white father), and when she sees Fletcher mistreating the Aborigines, she fires him and decides to try and run the station herself. She persuades her husband’s Drover (Hugh Jackman) to take the cattle to Darwin for sale, along with several other riders, including Drover’s Aboriginal brother-in-law Magarri (David Ngoombujarra), the boy, and the station’s accountant Kipling Flynn (Jack Thompson).

Their mission a success, Lady Sarah, Nullah, and Drover live happily for two years. Fletcher kills Carney and marries Carney’s daughter Cath Carney, takes over his empire, and continues to menace Lady Sarah.

A new era in animated storytelling begins on 9.9.09. Visionary filmmakers Tim Burton (The Corpse Bride, Charlie and The Chocolate Factory) and Timur Bekmambetov (Wanted, Nightwatch) join forces to produce wunderkind director Shane Acker’s distinctively original and thrilling tale. 9 stars Elijah Wood, John C. Reilly, Jennifer Connelly, Martin Landau, Christopher Plummer and Crispin Glover and features the music of Danny Elfman. When 9 (The Lord of the Ring’s Elijah Wood) first comes to life, he finds himself in a post-apocalyptic world. All humans are gone, and it is only by chance that he discovers a small community of others like him taking refuge from fearsome machines that roam the earth intent on their extinction. Despite being the neophyte of the group, 9 convinces the others that hiding will do them no good. They must take the offensive if they are to survive, and they must discover why the machines want to destroy them in the first place. As they’ll soon come to learn, the very future of civilization may depend on them.

A loose remake of 12 Angry Men (1957), set in a Russian school. 12 jurors are struggling to decide the fate of a Chechen teenager who allegedly killed his Russian stepfather. Stepfather took teenager to live with him to Moscow, during Chechnya war, in which teenager lost his parents. The jurors: a racist taxi-driver, a suspicious doctor, a vacillating TV producer, a Holocaust survivor, a flamboyant musician, a cemetery manager, and others represent the fragmented society of modern day Russia.A stray bird (a touch of New Age cinema) is flying above the jurors’ heads, alluding to tolerance.

DEFIANCE -Review -Gabriel Murray (Olympia Films) The Bielski family were farmers from Belarus. Following the German ” Operation Barbarossa ” the invasion of the Soviet Union that began on June 22,1921, the town Nowogrodek where the Bielski family lived became a Jewish Ghetto. The four Bielski brothers, Tuvia , Alexander Zisel “Zus”, Aseal, and Aron , managed to flee to the nearby forest after their parents and other family members were killed in the ghetto in December 1941. Together with 13 neighbours from the ghetto, they formed the their partisan combat group. Some 4,000 Jewish inhabitants were ordered by the Nazis to dig 40 deep pits. In temperatures that had plunged below zero, they were forced to take off their clothes and stand, facing the graves. Then they were shot, their bodies whether killed outright or injured falling into the graves where they were buried. Tuvia’s parents were among the dead. When he learned that his parents had been murdered, Bielski was tortured by remorse. Why hadn’t he stayed with them? Why hadn’t they all escaped together? Why hadn’t he convinced them to go on the run with him? At that moment, he swore that he would not only try to rescue the rest of his family, but also as many Jews young, old, frail, or ill as he possibly could. ‘I’d rather save one old Jewish woman than kill ten Nazi soldiers,’ he declared. ‘It was simple,’ Tuvia later recalled. ‘The Germans caught my father, mother and two of my brothers. They took them to the ghetto and from there they were taken to their deaths. The group’s commander was the eldest brother, Tuvia Bielski (19061987), Hundreds of men, women, and children eventually found their way to the Bielski camp eventually numbered 1200 individuals. Refusing to live in the Novogrudek ghetto where they would be subject to Nazi tyranny, he and three of his brothers went on the run, travelling from town to town in the dead of night, often sleeping in pigsties, on farms or in the woods. To Tuvia’s eternal regret, he was not in Novogrudek when, on December 7, 1941, the Germans launched a raid on the ghetto into which the rest of his family had been herded. The partisans lived in underground in bunkers. In addition, several utility structures were built: a kitchen, a mill, a bakery, a bathhouse, a medical clinic for sick and wounded, and a quarantine hut for those who suffered from infectious diseases such as typus. Herds of cows supplied milk. Artisans made goods and carried out repairs. More than a hundred workers toiled in the workshops, which became famous among partisans far beyond the Bielski base: tailors patched up old clothing and stitched together new garments; shoemakers fixed old and made new footwear; leather-workers worked on belts, bridles, and saddles.

Historical war drama about the Civil War battle at Antietam, and the formation of the first black regiment, the 54th Massachusetts Voluntary Infantry.

The story of General George S Patton, Jr. during the World War II phase of the controversial American general’s career. A military historian and poet, Patton believes he was a warrior in many past lives, and that he is destined for something great during this life; however, his stubborn and controversial methods nearly prevent the fulfillment of that destiny.

In 1914, a group of German teenagers volunteer for action on the Western Front. Paul Baumer is a sensitive youth, but is persuaded to join up by a war-mongering professor advocating glory for the Fatherland. Paul and his friends are trained under Himmelstoss, a kindly postmaster turned brutal corporal, and then sent to the front lines to taste battle, blood and death.