Andras Hamori Movies

Director Janos Szasz and co-screenwriter Andras Szeker draw inspiration from the unfinished diaries of pioneering Hungarian neurologist Dr. Jozsef Brenner (better known by his pen name Geza Csath) for this grim tale of a drug-addicted doctor and a deeply disturbed mental patient. Dr. Jozsef Brenner (Ulrich Thomsen) is a morphine-addicted medico with a bad case of writer's block. Convinced that he could summon creativity if he could only acquire some morphine, Dr. Brenner travels to a remote asylum for mentally afflicted women claiming that he needs the drugs for a psychoanalytic study. Dr. Brenner's cunning plan hits an unexpected hitch, however, when clinic director Moravcsik (Zsolt Laszlo) voices noticeable disapproval of the hedonistic new arrival's decidedly non-traditional methods. When Dr. Brenner makes the acquaintance of a deeply disturbed patient (Kristi Stubo) who believes her soul has been claimed by the devil, his bizarre attempt to ease the woman's pain while selfishly advancing his own cause proves profoundly unethical yet strangely effective. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide

One young man's devastating voyage through the Holocaust sets the stage for this powerful drama. Gyorgy "Gyurka" Koves (Marcell Nagy) is a 14-year-old Jewish boy living in Hungary when the Nazi pogroms begin sweeping through the country. Gyura's father (Janos Ban) has his business taken away from him not long before he's taken away to a concentration camp, and as he's led away, Gyura agrees to his father's request to look after his stepmother while he's gone. However, Gyurka takes a bus rather than the train to work the following morning, believing it to be safer, but before it can reach its destination, police stop the vehicle and take the Jewish passengers into custody. Gyurka is sent to Auschwitz, but is later transferred to Buchenwald, and finally to Zeitz; at each stop the teenager is witness to greater and greater horrors, as different varieties of torture and violence are introduced with each passing day, until his emotions begin to wear away. When American troops finally liberate Zeitz, Gyurka has been shocked into a placid serenity, and when he returns to the wreckage that is Budapest, his ravaged body and ghostly calm go mostly overlooked by the other survivors attempting to rebuild. Sorstalansag (aka Fateless) was adapted from a novel by Imre Kertesz, a Nobel Prize-winning author who is himself a survivor of the Nazi death camps. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

First-time screenwriter Stelios Pavlou enjoyed a major success with this script that he wrote while working in an English liquor store by sending it to actor Samuel L. Jackson, who signed on for one of the lead roles. Jackson is Elmo McElroy, a kilt-wearing, golf club-wielding Los Angeles native who has invented an illegal drug formula that he hopes will provide him with a last major score of 20 million dollars before he retires from a life of crime. He travels to Liverpool, England, where he hopes to find a buyer for his creation among the denizens of the city's rave scene, but his plans go awry when those who are in on the deal start turning up dead. Elmo's only protector is a chain-smoking, Yank-hating local hood named Felix De Souza (Robert Carlyle), who reluctantly partners with the violence-prone American to finish the deal and cash in, sparking a gang war between Elmo's vengeful one-time employer, The Lizard (Meat Loaf); Felix's boss, Durant (Ricky Tomlinson); crooked cop Virgil Kane (Sean Pertwee); a beautiful assassin, who also happens to be Felix's ex-girlfriend (Emily Mortimer); and an offbeat, yoga-practicing nightclub owner and mobster named Iki (Rhys Ifans). For its U.S. release, the title of The 51st State was changed to Formula 51. ~ Karl Williams, All Movie Guide

A woman's life is set onto a new path by tragedy and confusion in this offbeat drama from maverick director Lynne Ramsay. Morvern Callar (Samantha Morton) is a woman in her early twenties who wakes up in her flat in a small Scottish town on Christmas morning to a rather unpleasant surprise -- her live-in boyfriend has committed suicide, and his body lies on the floor in a pool of blood. She discovers that he has left a short message for her on the screen of his personal computer ("I love you. Be brave."), as well as the text of a novel he had recently completed. Changing the name on the title page to her own, Morvern begins sending the manuscript out to publishers without having actually read it. Eventually, Morvern disposes of her boyfriend's body, scrubs away the evidence of his suicide, and attempts to reintegrate herself with the world, though the shocking events seems to have built a wall between her and those around her, and she is unable to explain what has happened to anyone, even her best friend, Lanna (Kathleen McDermott). Eventually, Morvern draws the last of her boyfriend's money from the bank and treats herself and Lanna to a short vacation in Spain, where they become friendly with a group of hedonistic British expatriates and soon find their friendship stretched to the breaking point. Morvern Callar was based on the novel by Alan Warner; it was originally intended to be Lynne Ramsay's first directorial effort, but she was able to complete her film Ratcatcher before securing funding for this project. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg, who has long been fascinated by the ways new technology shapes and manipulates the human beings who believe they are its masters, is in familiar territory with eXistenZ, a futuristic thriller which combines elements of science fiction, horror and action-adventure. What is eXistenZ? According to the glossary Cronenberg put together for this film, it is a new organic game system that, when downloaded into humans, accesses their central nervous system, transporting them on a wild ride in and out of reality. What's more, it changes every time it is played, by adapting to the individual user -- you have to play the game to find out why you are playing the game. More than one person can plug into the same game and set out on a series of bizarre and surrealistic adventures together. The narrative takes place sometime in the near future, when game designers are worshipped as superstars and players can organically enter inside the games. Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh), the goddess among computer game designers whose latest invention, 'eXistenZ,' taps deeply into its users' fears and desires by blurring the boundaries between reality and escapism, is subject to an assassination attempt and forced to flee. Her sole ally is Ted Pikul (Jude Law), a novice security guard sworn to protect her. Persuading Ted to play the game, Allegra draws them both into a phantasmagoric world where existence ends and eXistenZ begins. Jennifer Jason Leigh, who is supposedly something of a computer nerd in real life, is hip and sexily alluring as Allegra Geller. When she and Pikul make love and are transported to the bizarre setting of a trout farm which has been converted to an assembly line production plant for games, they delve deeper into the dangerously intriguing game. Soon the forces of Anti-eXistenZialism will close in on Pikul and Allegra. eXistenZ marks the first time since Videodrome that Cronenberg has written a completely original screenplay. eXistenZ was inspired by the tribulations of the fugitive writer Salman Rushdie, author of the Satanic Verses. After interviewing the author for a magazine article in 1995, Cronenberg was struck with the idea of an artist who suddenly finds himself on a hit list for religious or philosophical reasons and is forced to go into hiding. The idea of a game came later on, for which he created a new vocabulary. According to Cronenberg, eXistenZ thematically connects to Crash, Videodrome, Naked Lunch and even M. Butterfly in terms of exploring the extent to which we create our own levels of reality and the idea of a creative act being dangerous to the creator. This is the second film on which Alliance Atlantis has been associated with Cronenberg, after Crash, which won the Special Jury Prize at the 1996 International Cannes Film Festival. On the occasion of the presentation of eXistenZ, Cronenberg received a Silver Bear for his outstanding artistic achievements at the 49th International Berlin Film Festival in 1999. ~ Gönül Dönmez-Colin, All Movie Guide

Sarah Kernochan wrote and directed this nostalgic coming-of-age comedy-drama with some autobiographical touches. In 1963, budgetary problems at the East Coast boarding school Miss Godard's School for Girls, prompt a merger with a boy's academy. The girls are stunned at the prospect of going co-ed and devise a campaign to sabotage the plan. Screenwriter Kernochan, scripter of Sommersby and 9 1/2 Weeks, won an Oscar when she co-directed the 1972 documentary Marjoe, but this film marks her feature directorial debut creating comedy-drama. The upstate New York seen here is actually Toronto. The title created some confusion, since Kernochan's film received reviews the same month the 1998 New York Film Festival unspooled a new 35mm print of Sergei Eisenstein's silent classic Strike (1924). ~ Bhob Stewart, All Movie Guide

After surviving a brutal car wreck, commercial director James Ballard finds himself slowly drawn to a mysterious subculture of people who have transformed automobile accidents into erotic events. Like the J.G. Ballard novel that inspired it, David Cronenberg's study of the sexual dimension of man's relationship to technology was a magnet for controversy, drawing a NC-17 rating and criticism from several sources, including studio owner Ted Turner, who attempted to prevent the film's American release. But though some have leveled charges of pornography, James' descent into this fetishistic underworld is approached with cold, scientific detachment. Characters like Vaughn, the charismatic group leader who stages recreations of celebrity car crashes, seem more like driven researchers than sexual renegades, which is undoubtedly part of the film's point. This impression is reinforced by the pristine cinematography by Peter Suschitzsky, which proves particularly haunting during a crucial accident scene, and Howard Shore's superb score. Far from exploitative, Crash in fact proves less transgressive than the original novel, but is still undoubtedly not for all tastes. ~ Judd Blaise, All Movie Guide

This historical drama is based on the true story of controversial medical pioneer Franz Anton Mesmer. In 18th century Vienna, Mesmer (Alan Rickman) believes that many of the favored medical treatments of the day -- most notoriously the inducement of bleeding to remove harmful "humors" from the body -- are both dangerous and ineffective to the patients they are intended to treat. Mesmer believes that gentler methods could have a more positive impact on his patients. Believing in what he calls "animal magnetism," Mesmer uses magnetic currents and the power of suggestion to treat patients; the medical establishment of the time regards him as a lunatic, so he performs most of his treatments on the poor, who cannot afford to pay a doctor, forcing Mesmer's well-to-do wife (Gillian Barge) to support the family. Mesmer receives a great deal of publicity when well-known pianist Maria Theresa Paradies (Amanda Ooms) suffers a severe seizure during a recital; while several physicians in attendance want to submit Paradies to an immediate bleeding, Mesmer applies his magnetism techniques, which prove to be effective in calming the young woman. Paradies was tremendously grateful to Mesmer and began seeing him regularly as a patient; she soon developed an emotional attachment to the doctor that became something of a public scandal. In time, the public's anger over Mesmer's unorthodox techniques and his perceived affair with Paradies forced him to leave Vienna for Paris, where he became the toast of the city's wealthy and privileged -- until the French medical community demanded that Mesmer prove the effectiveness of his techniques. Noted playwright Dennis Potter wrote the screenplay. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Anthony Shaw directs his mother, Angela Lansbury of Murder She Wrote, in this lighthearted made-for-television adventure. Set in the 1950's, Lansbury stars as Mrs. Harris, a common British woman so intent on owning a Dior gown, that she slaves and scrimps for years. However, upon travelling to Paris to make the purchase, Mrs. Harris encounters a series of unexpected characters and events that stand between her and the coveted gown. Originally broadcast in 1992, the film also features supporting performances by Diana Rigg, Lothaire Bluteau, and Omar Sharif. ~ Matthew Tobey, All Movie Guide

This made-for-cable vampire potboiler is distinguished mainly by the presence of director Stuart Gordon (of Re-Animator fame) and a sadly pallid looking Anthony Perkins in one of his last roles. Radiant Mia Sara plays schoolteacher Catherine Thatcher, whose trip to Budapest in search of her father (whom she has never met) reveals the grim underbelly of Romanian society in the dark days of Ceausescu. In an interesting twist, the dictator's sadistic secret police have become a veritable den of vampires (a barb-tongued breed dating back to Medieval times). Plots within plots unfold to reveal the true identity of Catherine's father. Gordon makes good use of authentic locations and somber atmosphere, blending the standard gothic look with a feel of social and spiritual decay -- but the bland script fails to exploit the metaphorical possibilities of this setting, and the silly horror effects make it hard to take seriously. ~ Cavett Binion, All Movie Guide

A young mother and her daughter end up on the streets in this grim made-for-television movie. Mare Winningham stars as Theresa Johnson, a young mother whose life falls apart when she finds herself suddenly single, unemployed and homeless. With nowhere to turn, Theresa and her daughter Hillary (Grace Johnston) drift through the social system, wandering from shelter to shelter with little hope for the future. Gripping in its portrayal of the cycle of poverty, the film offers no simple solutions -- much like real life. ~ Bernadette McCallion, All Movie Guide

In this exciting action thriller, an artistic widow fights to stay alive after her husband, a Marine who had discovered that the military was well aware that it was placing defective parts in its helicopters, is mysteriously murdered. Believing that the widow, a metal sculptress, has the damning evidence, the killers take off after her and her little son. None of them realizes that she too was a Marine and is more than capable of defending herself. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide