The heads of Wall Street’s biggest investment banks were summoned to an evening meeting by the US Treasury Secretary, Hank Paulson, to discuss the plight of another – Lehman Brothers. After six months’ turmoil in the world’s financial markets, Lehman Brothers was on life support and the government was about to pull the plug. Lehman CEO, Dick Fuld, recently sidelined in a boardroom coup, spends the weekend desperately trying to resuscitate his beloved company through a merger with Bank of America or UK-based Barclays. But without the financial support of Paulson and Lehman’s fiercest competitors, Fuld’s empire – and with it, the stability of the world economy – teeters on the verge of extinction.
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A man in his mid-20s and still living at home with his mother and stepfather who puts all his eggs in one basket: the girl who works at his local coffee shop. The problem is, she has a serious boyfriend. As the become closer, the line between friendship and intimacy is blurred, and the situation forces both to examine where they are in their lives.
With Egypt Valley Church out of funds and out of touch with the community, pastor Evan Bennett sets out to change things for the better. But there’s a problem… One family doesn’t like change, and is willing to do ANYTHING to stop him. How far will they go to preserve the Status quo ?
It’s 1982, and Taeko is 27 years old, unmarried, and has lived her whole life in Tokyo. She decides to visit her family in the countryside, and as the train travels through the night, memories flood back of her younger years: the first immature stirrings of romance, the onset of puberty, and the frustrations of math and boys. At the station she is met by young farmer Toshio, and the encounters with him begin to reconnect her to forgotten longings. In lyrical switches between the present and the past, Taeko contemplates the arc of her life, and wonders if she has been true to the dreams of her childhood self.
Lily (76) is sure there’s nothing wrong with her. The only reason she lives in a care home is because of her husband Max’s illness: a series of strokes has reduced him to a vegetable. The fact that Lily isn’t exactly the way she used to be becomes slowly clear in the Danish drama Key House Mirror – the title refers to a memory test. It’s not easy for Lily to leave her old habits behind her and fit in with the rules of the home. Her life blossoms when she meets an 80-year-old Swedish neighbour, a charming man who gives her the attention she has long missed. Lily’s daughter, however, is not so happy with the budding romance.
The picture opens in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, in late 1988, when military trainees Petrovsky, Ryaba, Chugun, Stas, Pinochet, Lyutev and Vorobyev are whipped into shape at a training camp by the brutal, sadistic commander, Warrant Officer Dygalo – prior to being sent off to the front lines. After several one-by-one dalliances with the local whore, Snow White, and a cautionary lecture on the history, geography and culture of Afghanistan (which most of the men sleep through), the trainees head off to battle – first to the Bagram air base, then to the Afghani province of Khost to secure supply lines. But nothing can begin to prepare them for the brutal devastation into which they are plunged, or the relentless tide of slaughter that scatters thousands of Soviet victims in its wake.
A man falls down the stairs, but instead of helping him, the bystanders just take photos with their phones. Lao Shi is a taxi driver and he’s fighting for justice in the darkest recesses of Chinese society. The man who pushed him got into his taxi drunk not so very long ago, grabbed the steering wheel and caused an accident. The victim of the crash has been in a coma ever since, and because his family is destitute, Lao Shi is paying the hospital bills. The insurance company is refusing to cover the costs because the taxi driver left the scene of the accident with the injured man because no help was in sight. Now Lao Shi needs the testimony of his passenger, who angrily refuses to cooperate.
Two lovers, Nikki and Al, have a scam in which Nikki allows herself to be picked up by older men, drugs them, and, with Al’s help, robs them. After accidentally killing one of her victims with an overdose, Nikki and Al are on the run.
Catherine is a woman in her late twenties who is strongly devoted to her father, Robert, a brilliant and well-known mathematician whose grip on reality is beginning to slip away. As Robert descends into madness, Catherine begins to wonder if she may have inherited her father’s mental illness along with his mathematical genius. When Robert’s work reveals a mathematical proof of potentially historic proportions, it sets off shock waves in more ways than one.