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A married doctor couple, Maria (Watts) and Henry (McGregor), has brought their three young boys on a much-needed vacation to the coast of the Indian Ocean. In a scenic resort, the brood fit in for a gorgeous afternoon poolside with nary a Christmas tree in sight and their holiday plans prepared for a beautiful vacation. That day, however, was not to be the one they had hoped for.

A mere fifteen minutes into the film, a slight breeze catches Maria's hair, quickly turning into a whipping gust of wind. It's one thing to hear stories of tsunamis and the spontaneity with which they appear, but it's another thing to see it happen in front of you. No warning. The ground rumbles, vacationers scatter and scream, their world about to be turned upside down, forever. From complete relaxation to impending death. No warning.Separated by rushing water and dangerous terrain, Maria and their eldest son Lucas (Holland) travel as best they can on her severely wounded leg towards civilization and hopefully help. The first half of the film focuses on this pair as if Henry and their other two children were swept into the sea like so many others. Henry, however, is still alive and his chapter begins at the halfway point when he tries to seek Maria and Lucas out. From then on, it becomes about the apparently insurmountable logistics involved in getting this family back together.

Technically impeccable, 'The Impossible' gives the brutal caprice of nature its due, never romanticizing it or demonizing it. It begins as a steady radio dial, suddenly and violently spun into fits of static and garbled chaos. Director Juan Antonio Bayona conducts this symphony with a steady hand and a wonderful visual eye. He spins the focus in on a single family caught up in the disaster, personalizing the horror and bringing it home in unashamedly melodramatic fashion on its very own tidal wave of emotion. While doing so, Bayona creates one of the most traumatizing and realistic disaster sequences in history. Avoiding the temptation to fill his piece with dramatic underscore that swells as our protagonists are tumbled in the muddy waters of the invading ocean, Bayona removes all musical accompaniment for this portion permitting loudness and utter silence to fill our senses along with visual stimuli that will leave you scarcely able to breathe. This swift wrath of nature is expertly realized, but the heart of the film is in its characters and how they respond to the betrayal of the world around them.

Naomi Watts, in her career best performance, expresses the rooted emotions of a mother both physically and emotionally, filling the film with so much fearlessness and unshakable motivation, that she enraptures the audience with her survival instincts. Ewan McGregor provides able support as the distressed father and is extremely competent. Tom Holland delivers one of the strongest juvenile debuts seen in years, conveying a complex series of emotions with natural serenity.

The Impossible separates itself from the other disaster films by focusing not just on the scale of the mayhem, but the intimacy of the struggle. Yes it takes us back to an epic nightmare that was the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004, but the flashback is vertiginous and horrible and oddly poetic.

Fred Zinnemann's 'The Day of the Jackal' is a patient, studied and quasi-documentary translation of Frederick Forsyth's best-selling political suspense novel. The film appeals more to the intellect than the brute senses, as it traces the detection of an assassin hired to kill French President Charles de Gaulle.

The story is set in Paris during a week in August of 1962. President De Gaulle (played by an uncanny look-alike), by granting Algeria their independence, upsets right-wing extremists and disgruntled war veterans, who form a secret terrorist organization known as OAS and vow to assassinate him. The film opens to a failed attempt on De Gaulle as he rides in a motorcade. After the OAS culprits are arrested and their leader executed six months later, their new leader and his three top aides secretly hire a mysterious Englishman- the eponymous Jackal (Fox) - to assassinate the President. Jackal accepts the offer and begins his methodical work to prepare the assassination. In the meantime, French security services receive some information about OAS plans and decide to hand over the case to Inspector Lebel (Lonsdale), the best investigator in France. But he doesn't even know who the jackal is. He learns the name "Jackal" from an informer in the plotter's ranks and cleverly pieces together the identity of the killer-for-hire.

What follows is an intricate and meticulous story with a parallel structure that details the Jackal's preparations for the assassination and Lebel's efforts to stop him. The major asset of the film is that it succeeds in maintaining interest and suspense despite obvious viewer foreknowledge of the outcome. Director Zinnemann faithfully follows the source, presenting a precise, almost discomfiting reconstruction of the story. He directs it with the skill of a master craftsman, creating a riveting cat-and-mouse game between the mysterious lone-wolf hired assassin known only by his code name and the master policeman in charge of the investigation. He does a fine job of presenting the narrative in such a precise way despite offering no psychological analysis or humor, building in tension to the concluding assassination attempt. Playing the titular Jackal, Edward Fox is superb as the coldly impassionate killer. He's boyishly charming, impeccably groomed, possessed of an easy laugh, and casually ruthless. Michael Lonsdale is properly plodding, yet magnificently analytical as the detective tracking him down.

The Day of the Jackal is a polished, electrifying thriller, mercifully unburdened with heavy political digressions. The screenplay meticulously assembles an incredible array of material, and then Fred Zinnemann choreographs it so that the story - complicated as it is - unfolds in almost documentary starkness. Telling the story very methodically, by exposing small details that would later be important pieces of great puzzle, he manages to achieve a dignified tone and compelling pace seldom seen in latter-day thrillers.

Early on, Earthlings, a documentary film by Shaun Monson, presents striking images of Nazi genocidal atrocities towards Jews, which elicit a curious cognitive dissonance in the viewer's mind - certainly the Jews were cruelly "treated like animals", but on this occasion we are moved to ask a different question: should even animals be treated this way? Or did the Nazi treatment of Jews stem in fact from the socially accepted reduction of animals to mere objects? From there on, it goes on to discuss the extent of modern society's pervasive speciesism, successively covering five expanses: Pets, Food, Clothes, Entertainment and Science. The ordering of this sequence is cunning and effective, and it helps Monson make his case about the endemic nature of speciesism in our society.

Earthlings speaks to our innate sense of compassion. Something that is there inside all of us, but needs a reawakening. It is a movie that examines our spiritual conscience, personal evolution and so much more. I did have to prepare myself before I watched it mentally not to cry through the entire movie. I managed to get by with tears welling up in my eyes, and some trickling down my face, but that was unavoidable. If you have at least a bit of a heart within you, this movie is going to make you cringe at times and evoke some serious emotion, but that is not a good enough reason not to see it. I'm not going to attempt to describe the ghastly scenes in Earthlings. There were parts I missed because I had to turn away. At other times I acted like a little kid watching a horror film, covering my face with my hands, only watching what could slip through the cracks between my fingers. But this is no horror movie. Earthlings is real. Yes, it is inconvenient to find this out. Yes, it is going to make you rethink your ways, and yes, it may lead you to make some major changes in your life, but that is what evolution of the human being and spirit is all about.

As a production, Monson's Earthlings is a meticulously crafted work, featuring narration by Joaquin Phoenix, a moodily effective musical score by Moby, and rare footage from inside the animal factory farming industry that must have been difficult to acquire, giving it the right atmosphere and the right facts to really drive the message home.

Earthlings forcefully, sometimes disturbingly, reminds us of an essential character of our consciousness, something about ourselves that our culture often dismisses: compassion and empathy. Along the way it shows and tells some inconvenient truths that most of us would probably prefer to avoid, laying bare a mass hypocrisy that we mindlessly accept. Earthlings shows us what is right there to see, if we would only look directly and honestly.