Michael Beach

Just Getting By-a new documentary film be Bess O'Brien is a sweeping, and yet intimate look at the lives of Vermonters who are struggling with food and housing insecurity. Vermont has the second highest rate of homeless people in the United States, right after California. One third of Vermonters struggle to put food on the table. These are big issues for a small state. Just Getting By focuses on these issues in the lives of everyday people. The film tells the stories of working families, folks who are homeless and are accessing food shelves and soup kitchens, people who are living in the temporary hotel/motel program, New Americans grappling with the cost of living in America, Native people creating innovative farming practices and folks on the ground providing services to their fellow Vermonters in need. Just Getting By explores the day to day challenges and incredible resiliency that low-income Vermonters bear witness to every day.

When a powerful superintelligence studies Carol, the fate of the world hangs in the balance.

Aquaman reveals the origin of half-human, half-Atlantean Arthur Curry and takes him on the journey of his lifetime, to discover if he is worthy of who he was born to be...a king.

Set in the 1970s Tish (Kiki Layne) is a 19-year-old African-American woman living in West Harlem, New York City, and she is madly in love with Fonny (Stephan James), a fellow African American man who is a few years older than her. He is kind and warm and loves her deeply. Tish goes to the prison where Fonny is incarcerated to tell him that she's having a baby. Both of them are thrilled, the circumstances non-withstanding. Tish goes home sees her mother Sharon (Regina King). Sharon asks how Fonny is doing - he's in jail after being falsely identified in a rape case and is currently on trial. Tish nervously tell Sharon she is pregnant, and Sharon helps her tell the rest of the family: her father Joseph (Colman Domingo) and her sister Ernestine (Teyonah Parris). They are a little shocked but supportive, a tight-knit, loving group. After wondering when they should tell Fonny's family, Sharon decides to invite them over for drinks since it's a Saturday night and no time like the present. Throughout the film, we cut back to Tish and Fonny's life before he went to prison. We seem on an early date, walking through the city and getting to know one another. Back in the present, Fonny's parents, the jokester Frank (Michael Beach) and the cruel, religious Mrs. Hunt (Aunjanue Ellis) arrive with their two daughters. Mrs. Hunt and their daughters think they are too good for Tish and her family. When they tell Fonny's family, only Frank is positive. Mrs. Hunt curses Tish, and tells her the child is born from sin and is going to shrivel in her womb - and Frank punches her, hard. Everyone scrambles, Joseph takes Frank out, and Mrs. Hunt's daughters help her up. Sharon and Ernestine properly shame Mrs. Hunt, asking how she could be so cruel, and they kick the women out of their home. As the flashbacks continue, we see Tish and Fonny sleep together for the first time. In the present, Sharon and Tish go to see Hayward (Finn Wittrock), a lawyer that is going to take Fonny's defense. Victoria Rogers (Emily Rios), the victim, was a Puerto Rican woman living in New York when she was brutally assaulted. A white police officer, Officer Bell (Ed Skrein), claims he saw Fonny running from the scene of the crime, even though Fonny was with his friend Daniel Carty (Brian Tyree Henry) at the time. He then showed Victoria the lineup, and she identified Fonny. Hayward explains there are two problems: one, Victoria is missing and can't be questioned. Two, the district attorney's office has arrested Carty and won't let Hayward see him. Hayward is going to fight but warns them it will be a tough battle to win. In flashbacks, Daniel gets out of prison after two years and comes to stay with Fonny and Tish. He is jovial, but his time in prison has shaken him. He clearly is drinking as a way to cope and confesses to Fonny that he pled guilty to stealing a car to get out of a marijuana charge after being pressured by police officers... even though he doesn't even know how to drive. Tish gets farther along in her pregnancy, working as a counter girl in a department store to make ends meet. Ernestine tells Tish that Victoria has been located... in Puerto Rico. Tish is devastated, knowing she can't get there to talk to her. Money is piling up for legal defenses, and Frank commiserates with Joseph, who assures him they'll get it done. They begin stealing from the docks and re-selling the goods. In flashbacks, we see when Tish and Fonny got their loft together. They had been turned away from many places simply for being black, but Levy (Dave Franco), the young Jewish man showing them the space, tells them that love is love and he's his mother's son. Tish looks around a corner store while Fonny goes to get cigarettes, and while in the store, a young racist white man starts harassing her. Fonny arrives and throws the man out of the store, but Officer Bell (the man who will later say he saw Fonny running from the crime scene) arrives and threatens Fonny with assault charges. Tish and Fonny explain that he was defending Tish, but Bell refuses to listen and begins to arrest Fonny until the store manager, a white woman, comes forward and tells Bell that what they said was true and to leave them alone. Bell vows to see Fonny again. Sharon arrives in Puerto Rico, attempting to find Victoria. She first finds Pietro (Pedro Pascal), Victoria's boyfriend. He at first refuses to help her find Victoria, but she passionately insists that Fonny didn't rape her and begs to speak with her. He helps her find Victoria, who is visibly traumatized from what happened to her. Sharon tries to speak with her, acknowledging what happened to her was horrible but trying to explain that she has the wrong man. Victoria explains that the police asked her to pick Fonny out and she did and that that's the end. Sharon explains that she only saw Fonny in the lineup Officer Bell showed her - she presses further, but Victoria begins screaming, hysterical, and is eventually taken away by other women, leaving Sharon alone, devastated. Tish goes to see Fonny in prison, who looks worse than ever. She has bad news: Victoria has disappeared again, and now the trial might be postponed. Fonny is distraught. Tish has the baby, and Fonny, faced with the prospect of losing the trial, takes a plea for a lesser sentence. Several years later, Tish brings their child, a young boy named after his father, to visiting hours at the prison. The three have a makeshift family dinner with food bought from the vending machines and enjoy having some moments actually together.

Two bungling, petty criminal BFFs try to rob a church, but someone from staff beat them to it. They spend the night with the church staff to get the money. Durell Washington and LeeJohn Jackson are best friends and bumbling petty criminals. When Durell learns that his ex-girlfriend plans to move to another state with their son Durell Jr.--unless they can get her $17,000 to pay off a debt--Durell and LeeJohn ultimately come up with a desperate scheme to rob their neighborhood church. When the duo fumbles their way through the break-in, they discover someone has beaten them to the punch. In order to get their hands on the money, Durell and LeeJohn are forced to spend the night in the presence of the Lord and his followers, including Ricky, the eccentric choir director --and end up getting a lot more than they bargained for. —Anthony Pereyra {hypersonic91@yahoo.com}

An Internal Affairs agent becomes obsessed with bringing down a cop who has managed to maintain a spotless reputation despite being involved in a web of corruption. Keen young Raymond Avila joins the Internal Affairs Department of the Los Angeles police. He and partner Amy Wallace are soon looking closely at the activities of cop Dennis Peck whose financial holdings start to suggest something shady. Indeed Peck is involved in any number of dubious or downright criminal activities. He is also devious, a womaniser, and a clever manipulator, and he starts to turn his attention on Avila. —Jeremy Perkins {J-26} Earnest Raymond Avilla has just begun his assignment in the LAPD's Internal Affairs Division (IAD) partnered with capable and bright Amy Wallace, the IAD arguably the most hated division by the non-IAD officers in its members being seen as opportunistic in getting ahead in the force investigating their "brothers". To show that he is above board, Raymond agrees as his and Amy's first case as partners that of Van Stretch, Raymond wanting to seem impartial despite he and Van going back to their days together in the academy. Although there does seem to be improper conduct by Van, Raymond begins to believe a bigger, more dangerous fish is Van's partner Dennis Peck, who outwardly is seen as the model officer by the force's highers-up. What Raymond sees in Dennis is a bright officer too content in his relatively low position within the force, he who is able to live beyond his means, especially in having to pay alimony and child support to several ex-wives. In reality, Dennis is not only a womanizer and chronic philanderer in still fooling around with other women despite again being married, but is a master manipulator in working every situation to his benefit and often illegal end goals, that manipulation often of crime scenes and of his fellow officers, including Van and by association Van's occasionally battered wife, Penny Stretch. What ensues is a game of cat and mouse between Raymond and Dennis which becomes personal in both sides using the other's family - Dennis' wife Heather Peck and Raymond's contemporary art gallery curator wife Kathleen Avilla - to achieve their respective end goals, which may be more dangerous for Raymond and Kathleen as Dennis has and will kill to protect his way of life. —Huggo

The dedicated but tyrannical Joe Clark is appointed the principal of a decaying inner-city school he is determined to improve by any and all means. An arrogant and unorthodox teacher returns as principal to the idyllic high school from which he had earlier been fired to find it a den of drug abuse, gang violence, and urban despair. Eventually he is successful but unorthodox methods lead to a clash with city officials that threatens to undo all his efforts. Based on a true story. —Keith Loh <loh@sfu.ca> When a school in Paterson, New Jersey, has less-than-average basic skills test scores, it faces the possibility of being taken over by the state. So the mayor asks the school superintendent for help, and he suggests that they appoint the controversial Joe Clark as the school principal. Clark begrudgingly agrees. And when he arrives, he shakes things up by reassigning teachers and calling all of them incompetent. And it isn't long before a lot of people want him out, but at the same time, he gains the respect of some of the teachers and the students. —rcs0411@yahoo.com

When the closure of a railway is announced, employees commandeer a locomotive to get to corporate headquarters and confront the president. 2 workers from a railway company realize that the company want to close the railroad track where they work. They steal an engine and travel through America to the company's headquarters to protest the closing. While traveling they have a lot of adventurous moments. —Kornel Osvart <kornelo@alphanet.hu>