In the Nineteenth Century, orphan Oliver Twist is sent from the orphanage to a workhouse, where the children are mistreated and barely fed. He moves to the house of an undertaker, but after an unfair severe spank, he starts a seven day runaway to London. He arrives exhausted and starving, and is soon welcomed in a gang of pickpockets lead by the old crook Fagin. When he is mistakenly taken as a thief, the wealthy victim Mr. Brownlow brings Oliver to his home and shelters him. But Fagin and the dangerous Bill Sykes decide to kidnap Oliver to burglarize Mr. Brownlow's fancy house.

2005 drama film directed by Roman Polanski

Plame's status as a CIA agent was revealed by White House officials allegedly out to discredit her husband after he wrote a 2003 New York Times op-ed piece saying that the Bush administration had manipulated intelligence about weapons of mass destruction to justify the invasion of Iraq.

Norma and Arthur Lewis, a suburban couple with a young child, receive a simple wooden box as a gift, which bears fatal and irrevocable consequences. A mysterious stranger delivers the message that the box promises to bestow upon its owner $1 million with the press of a button. However, pressing this button will simultaneously cause the death of another human being somewhere in the world, someone they don't know. With just 24 hours to have the box in their possession, Norma and Arthur find themselves in the cross-hairs of a startling moral dilemma and must face the true nature of their humanity.

Los Angeles, 1928. Single mother Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie) returns from work to find her nine-year-old son Walter (Gattlin Griffith) gone. She calls the L.A.P.D. to initiate a search. Five months later, a boy is found in Illinois who fits the description, and he says he's her son. To fanfare and photos, the L.A.P.D. reunite mother and son, but she insists he's not her boy. The cops dismiss her as either a liar or hysterical. When she joins a minister in his public criticism of the Police, they in turn use government power to silence and intimidate her. Meanwhile, a cop goes to a dilapidated ranch to find a Canadian lad who's without legal status; the youth tells a grisly tale. There's redress for murder; is there redress for abuse of power?

In the high-stakes world of political power-brokers, Elizabeth Sloane (Jessica Chastain) is the most sought after and formidable lobbyist in D.C. Known equally for her cunning and her track record of success, she has always done whatever is required to win. But when she takes on the most powerful opponent of her career, she finds that winning may come at too high a price.

PROT is a patient at a mental hospital who claims to be from a faraway planet named K-PAX. His psychiatrist tries to help him, only to begin to doubt his own explanations.

Rancher Dan Evans heads into Bisbee to clear up issues concerning the sale of his land when he witnesses the closing events of a stagecoach robbery led by famed outlaw Ben Wade. Shortly thereafter, Wade is captured by the law in Bisbee and Evans finds himself one of the escorts who will take Wade to the 3:10 to Yuma train in Contention for the reward of $200. Evans' effort to take Wade to the station is in part an effort to save his land but also part of an inner battle to determine whether he can be more than just a naive rancher in the eyes of his impetuous and gun slinging son William Evans. The transport to Contention is hazardous and filled with ambushes by Indians, pursuits by Wade's vengeful gang and Wade's own conniving and surreptitious demeanor that makes the ride all the more intense.

After a bank heist in Abilene with several casualties, the bank robber Seth Gecko and his psychopath and rapist brother Richard Gecko continue their crime spree in a convenience store in the middle of the desert while heading to Mexico with a hostage. They decide to stop for a while in a low-budget motel. Meanwhile the former minister Jacob Fuller is traveling on vacation with his son Scott and his daughter Kate in a RV. Jacob lost his faith after the death of his beloved wife in a car accident and quit his position of pastor of his community and stops for the night in the same motel Seth and Richard are lodged. When Seth sees the recreational vehicle, he abducts Jacob and his family to help his brother and him to cross the Mexico border, promising to release them on the next morning. They head to the truck drivers and bikers bar Titty Twister where Seth will meet with his partner Carlos in the dawn. When they are watching the dancer Santanico Pandemonium, Seth and Richard fight with three bodyguards. But soon they discover that the bar is a coven of vampires and they need to fight until dawn to leave the place alive.

'Inside Job' provides a comprehensive analysis of the global financial crisis of 2008, which at a cost over $20 trillion, caused millions of people to lose their jobs and homes in the worst recession since the Great Depression, and nearly resulted in a global financial collapse. Through exhaustive research and extensive interviews with key financial insiders, politicians, journalists, and academics, the film traces the rise of a rogue industry which has corrupted politics, regulation, and academia. It was made on location in the United States, Iceland, England, France, Singapore, and China.

American documentary film, directed by Charles Ferguson, about the late-2000s financial crisis

"2001" is a story of evolution. Sometime in the distant past, someone or something nudged evolution by placing a monolith on Earth (presumably elsewhere throughout the universe as well). Evolution then enabled humankind to reach the moon's surface, where yet another monolith is found, one that signals the monolith placers that humankind has evolved that far. Now a race begins between computers (HAL) and human (Bowman) to reach the monolith placers. The winner will achieve the next step in evolution, whatever that may be.

In the 1970s, terrorist violence is the stuff of networks' nightly news programming and the corporate structure of the UBS Television Network is changing. Meanwhile, Howard Beale, the aging UBS news anchor, has lost his once strong ratings share and so the network fires him. Beale reacts in an unexpected way. We then see how this affects the fortunes of Beale, his coworkers (Max Schumacher and Diana Christensen), and the network.

On the day of James T. Kirk's birth, his father dies on his damaged starship in a last stand against a Romulan mining vessel looking for Ambassador Spock, who in this time, has grown on Vulcan disdained by his neighbors for his half-human heritage. 25 years later, James T. Kirk has grown into a young rebellious troublemaker. Challenged by Captain Christopher Pike to realize his potential in Starfleet, he comes to annoy academy instructors like Commander Spock. Suddenly, there is an emergency on Vulcan and the newly-commissioned USS Enterprise is crewed with promising cadets like Nyota Uhura, Hikaru Sulu, Pavel Chekov and even Kirk himself, thanks to Leonard McCoy's medical trickery. Together, this crew will have an adventure in the final frontier where the old legend is altered forever as a new version of the legend begins.

In the dystopian world of 2027 London, humans have been incapable of reproducing for 18 year for an unknown reason, meaning the imminent extinction of the species. Britain is the one remaining civilized society on the planet, which has resulted in people wanting to migrate there, so it has become a police state to handle the immigrants, who are placed into refugee camps. Lowly government bureaucrat Theo Faron, once an activist, is approached by the Fishes, deemed a terrorist group, led by his ex-wife Julian Taylor, whom he hasn't seen in almost 20 years, since their marriage disintegrated after their infant son Dylan's death during the 2008 flu pandemic. Although the Fishes did use terrorist means in their on-going revolution against the state in the fight for immigrant rights, Julian vows that they now garner support solely by speaking to the people, and she wants Theo to use his connections to get transit papers for a young immigrant woman named Kee who needs to get to the coast. Although initially reluctant to do it because of the difficulty, Theo is able to grant Julian this favor, however with the change that he now needs to accompany Kee on her journey. As Theo and Kee progress on that journey, Theo learns more and more about what's going on, including the reason that Kee needs to get to the coast, the fact that no one in the group knows if their end destination even exists, and that his and Kee's lives are in greater danger than he believed when they started the journey. But Theo's sole mission becomes to help Kee at any cost for the survival of the species.

When virtually all of the residents of Piedmont, New Mexico, are found dead after the return to Earth of a space satellite, the head of the US Air Force's Project Scoop declares an emergency. Many years prior to this incident, a group of eminent scientists led by Dr. Jeremy Stone (

In a world without anonymity or crime, a detective meets a woman who threatens their security.

In the near future, Earth is dying. A new colony on Mars could be humanity's only hope. A team of American astronauts, each a specialist in a different field, is making the first manned expedition to the red planet and must struggle to overcome the differences in their personalities, backgrounds and ideologies for the overall good of the mission. When their equipment suffers life-threatening damage and the crew must depend on one another for survival on the hostile surface of Mars, their doubts, fears and questions about God, man's destiny and the nature of the universe become defining elements in their fates. In this alien environment they must come face to face with their most human selves.

Must-see thrillers

Liked by