Peter Maxwell Movies

A girl searches for her father while he is forced to answer for some of his misdeeds in this beautifully photographed adventure drama. Gary (Julian Sands) is a French geologist who lives in Africa, where he's made a fortune in the diamond business. Gary has a fourteen-year-old daughter named Grace (Camille Summers) from a marriage that ended in divorce. When Grace's mother passes on, Grace flies to Africa to visit Gary for the first time in years. While Gary is thrilled to see Grace, work calls him away the day after she arrives, and he boards a small plane to take some needed supplies into a remote area. However, the plane hits some bad weather and crashes, with the wreckage found by a band of revolutionary soldiers. The makeshift army is battling wealthy mining moguls like Gary, appalled by the child labor, environmental devastation and economic exploitation that thrive in their wake. While Gary is held hostage by the guerillas, Grace suspects something is wrong, and she persuades one of Gary's closest friends, Kadjiro (Eriq Ebouaney), to help her find her dad. La Piste (aka The Trail) was directed by Eric Valli, a former photographer for National Geographic. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Haughty and vain British industrialist Thomas Smithers (Pete Postlethwaite) dearly loves his wife Juliana (Greta Sacchi). Since they only have a daughter (Carmen Chaplin), and a strange one at that, Smithers decides that rather than leaving his fortune to his wife and child, he will build a fabulous garden to honor Julianna, who unfortunately, cares little for such things. Hearing of Smithers's plans, Julianna's conniving cousin Fitzmaurice (Richard E. Grant), who has secretly wanted her for himself, suggests that Smithers hire hot young Dutch garden architect Meneer Chrome (Ewan McGregor) to do the work. Chrome's work does not come cheap, but that is fine with Fitzmaurice who is hoping that the project will bankrupt Smithers and cause Julianna to return to him. Unfortunately for Fitzmaurice, Julianna finds herself falling in love with Chrome. Unfortunately for Julianna, Chrome has fallen in love with her daughter Thea. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

This cinematic/literary hybrid fuses motifs from Beat writer William S. Burroughs's novel of the same name with elements of the author's biography and plenty of the cerebral alienation and biomorphic special effects fans of creepy cult director David Cronenberg have come to expect. Bill Lee (Peter Weller) wants to write, but he exterminates bugs to pay the bills. His wife, Joan (Judy Davis), becomes addicted to Bill's bug powder dust, and soon he joins her in a world of unorthodox hallucinogens; he visits the kindly yet sinister Dr. Benway (Roy Scheider) and walks away with his first dose of the black meat -- a narcotic made from the flesh of the giant aquatic Brazilian centipede. Soon, monstrous beetles are whispering conspiracy theories in Bill's ears and his nebbish writer friends Hank (Nicholas Campbell) and Martin (Michael Zelniker) are sleeping with Joan under his nose. When a party trick involving a liquor glass and a gun goes awry, killing Joan, Bill flees to Interzone, a Mediterranean city full of talking insectoid typewriters, double agents, offbeat aesthetes, and plots within plots. As he navigates this paranoid landscape, Bill begins ingesting another drug called mugwump jism and writes fragments that Hank and Martin soon assemble into a novel under the title Naked Lunch. As beat literature aficionados know, Interzone is based on Tangiers -- the city where Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch. The incident in the film in which Hank and Martin appropriate Bill's writing and have it published closely approximates the real-life circumstances of the novel's publication, although it was Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac who helped out the real-life Burroughs. The William Tell incident that kills Bill's wife is also drawn from the author's real life. "William Lee" is both Burroughs' literary stand-in and the name under which he published his first autobiographical novel Junky. Ian Holm, who plays Joan Frost's husband, Tom, would appear in Cronenberg's similarly experimental eXistenZ several years later. ~ Brian J. Dillard, All Movie Guide

The Australian Highest Honor is comparatively little-known outside its country of origin, which is a shame. Set during World War II, the film details the unusual relationship between an Australian army captain and his captor, a Japanese security officer. The war has made these kindred spirits "enemies," and we, like the protagonists, are never allowed to forget the seriousness of the world conflict. Still, we are shown how even the exigencies of war cannot completely snuff out such qualities as honor and decency. John Howard plays Captain Robert Page, while Astuo Nakamura co-stars as Winoyu Tamira. Highest Honor is based on a true story. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Some of the complexities involved in the murder of 5,000 Chinese in Singapore during World War II are considered in this joint Japanese-Australian film. After the British surrendered Singapore to the Japanese, the Imperial Japanese Army unit known as the kempei-tai or a kind of military police, were responsible for most of the brutality against captured Allied forces and the "ethnic cleansing" of Chinese based on the claim that their guerrilla forces were a threat. The hero of the film is Minoru Tamiya (Atsuo Nakamura) who worked as an information officer at the Japanese mission in Singapore before the outbreak of World War II. In this story, Tamiya was educated at Cambridge and argued for the humane treatment of prisoners of war against the harsh, often fatal, and degrading methods used by the kempei-tai. The difficulties of his position come to a climax in a melodramatic ending, in which the fate of a group of Allies and the fate of the Japanese themselves are symbolically bound together. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

Three attractive women turn into Robin Hoods in order to save a kindergarten in this routine comedy-caper. Eva (Wendy Hughes), Fiona (Chantal Contouri), and Millicent (Carmen Duncan) are ready to help out a charitable cause when they see one, but their hearts are bigger than their wallets. The only solution is to take money from those who have it to burn and judiciously redistribute it. With that thought in mind, the three recruit a few extra women to their cause -- they plan on robbing from the rich in a posh island resort. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

The villains in the British The Switch are members of a wristwatch-smuggling gang. Poor Zena Marshall knows too much, so the gangs abducts her. Stalwart customs official Anthony Steel struggles manfully to rescue the girl. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In this interesting mystery, a police inspector learns that an artist's wife has been murdered and her identity assumed by one of the artist's models. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Set in post WW II-Vienna this British spy adventure centers on an international effort to thwart the communists that is led by an American newspaper journalist trying to save the two innocents from certain death. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Escaping from an insane asylum, Ellen Summers (Lana Morris) calls upon "Invisible Man" Peter Brady, claiming that she being held against her will by sinister forces. She further explains that her fiance George Wilson has been falsely convicted of murder and condemned to death. With only a few hours before the execution, Peter must deploy his invisibility to round up the miscreants who have misused Ellen and rescue Wilson from the hangman's noose--assuming, of course, that the girl is telling the truth. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide