Defiance

Defiance

Defiance is a 2008 war film written, produced, and directed by Edward Zwick, set in the western part of the Nazi occupied Belarusian SSR.

The film is an adaptation of Nechama Tec's Defiance: The Bielski Partisans, which tells how the region was in Poland to 1939 and was seized by the Soviet Union in accordance with the Nazi-Soviet pact. Tec writes that Jews in the area of Nowogrodek, or Navahrudak, welcomed the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939. Tec also writes that when Germany launched Operation Barbarossa in 1941, the Bielskis operated as Soviet partisans in Poland, saving and recruiting Jews into their units.

Defiance stars Daniel Craig, Liev Schreiber, Jamie Bell, and George MacKay as four Jewish brothers from Belarus who escaped the Nazi persecution and fought back to rescue fellow Jews. Production began in early September 2007. The film had a limited release in the United States on December 31, 2008,and went into general release worldwide on January 16, 2009.It was released on home media on June 2, 2009.

Ratatouille

Ratatouille
Ratatouille is a 2007 computer-animated film produced by Pixar and distributed by Walt Disney Pictures. The film was the eighth movie produced by Pixar, and was directed by Brad Bird, who took over from Jan Pinkava in 2005. The title refers to a French dish which is served late in the film, and is also a play on words on the species of the main character.

The plot follows Remy, a rat who dreams of becoming a chef and tries to achieve his goal by forming an alliance with a Parisian restaurant's garbage boy. Ratatouille was released on June 29, 2007 in the United States, to both critical acclaim and box office success, and later won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, among other honors.

Slumdog Millionaire

Slumdog Millionaire
Slumdog Millionaire is a 2008 British film directed by Danny Boyle, written by Simon Beaufoy, and co-directed in India by Loveleen Tandan. It is an adaptation of the novel Q & A (2005) by Indian author and diplomat Vikas Swarup. Set and filmed in India, the film tells the story of a young man from the slums of Mumbai who appears on the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? (Kaun Banega Crorepati in the Hindi version) and exceeds people's expectations, thereby arousing the suspicions of the game show host and of law enforcement officials.

After its world premiere at Telluride Film Festival and subsequent screenings at the Toronto International Film Festival and the London Film Festival, Slumdog Millionaire initially had a limited North American release on 12 November 2008, to critical acclaim. It later had a nationwide grand release in the United Kingdom on 9 January 2009 and in the United States on 23 January 2009. It premiered in Mumbai on 22 January 2009. It was released on DVD and Blu-ray in the United States on 31 March 2009.

Slumdog Millionaire was nominated for ten Academy Awards in 2009 and won eight, the most for any film of 2008, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay. It also won seven BAFTA Awards (including Best Film), five Critics' Choice Awards, and four Golden Globes. Slumdog Millionaire has stirred controversy concerning language use, its portrayals of Indians and Hinduism, and the welfare of its child actors

WALL-E

WALL-E
WALL-E (promoted with an interpunct as WALL•E) is a 2008 computer-animated science fiction film produced by Pixar Animation Studios and directed by Andrew Stanton. It follows the story of a robot named WALL-E who is designed to clean up a waste-covered Earth far in the future. He eventually falls in love with another robot named EVE, and follows her into outer space on an adventure that changes the destiny of both his kind and humanity.

After directing Finding Nemo, Stanton felt Pixar had created believable simulations of underwater physics and was willing to direct a film largely set in space. Most of the characters do not have actual human voices, but instead communicate with body language and robotic sounds, designed by Ben Burtt, that resemble voices. In addition, it is the first animated feature by Pixar to have segments featuring live-action characters.

Walt Disney Pictures released it in the United States and Canada on June 27, 2008. The film grossed US$23.1 million on its opening day, and $63 million during its opening weekend in 3,992 theaters, ranking #1 at the box office. This ranks as the fourth highest-grossing opening weekend for a Pixar film as of May 31, 2009. Following Pixar tradition, WALL-E was paired with a short film, Presto, for its theatrical release. WALL-E has been met with overwhelmingly positive reviews among critics, scoring an approval rating of 96% on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. It grossed $534 million worldwide, won the 2008 Golden Globe Award for Best Animated Feature Film, the 2009 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form, the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature as well as being nominated for five other Academy Awards at the 81st Academy Awards.

Alvin and the Chipmunks

Alvin and the Chipmunks

Alvin and the Chipmunks is an animated music group created by Ross Bagdasarian, Sr. in 1958. The group consists of three singing animated chipmunks: Alvin, the mischievous troublemaker, who quickly became the star of the group; Simon, the tall, bespectacled intellectual; and Theodore, the chubby, impressionable sweetheart. The trio is managed by their human father and confidant, David Seville. In reality, David Seville was Bagdasarian's stage name, and the Chipmunks themselves are named after the executives of their original record label, Liberty Records: Alvin Bennett (the president), Simon Waronker (the founder and owner), and Theodore Keep (the chief engineer).

The Chipmunks act began with recordings first brought to life in Bagdasarian's 1950s novelty recordings under the name David Seville and the Chipmunks. For stage purposes, such as during an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, Bagdasarian lip-synched the words of "David Seville" in front of a small puppet theater, with puppets of the three Chipmunks also lip-synching. The puppets looked similar to the Chipmunk illustrations on the covers of some of the group's 45 RPM records. The characters were an unprecedented success, and the singing Chipmunks and their manager were given life in several animated cartoon shows, using redrawn, anthropomorphic chipmunks, and eventually motion pictures.

The voices of the group were all performed by Bagdasarian, who sped up the playback to create higher pitched voices. This oft-used process was also not entirely new to Bagdasarian, who had also used it for two previous novelty song projects, including "The Witch Doctor," but it was so unusual and well executed it earned the trio two Grammy Awards for engineering. Although the characters were fictional, they did release a long line of actual albums and singles, with "The Chipmunk Song" becoming a number-one hit single in the United States. After Ross Bagdasarian, Sr.'s death in 1972, their voices were performed by Ross Bagdasarian, Jr. and Janice Karman in all subsequent incarnations except for the 2007 CGI/live-action film adaptation, when they were voiced by Justin Long, Matthew Gray Gubler and Jesse McCartney respectively.

Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi

Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi

Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi (Hindi: - रब ने बना दी जोडी ), translation: A Match Made in Heaven) is a 2008 Indian romantic comedy directed by Aditya Chopra and produced by Yash Raj Films. Shahrukh Khan stars in the film as mild-mannered office worker Surinder "Suri" Sahni whose love for beautiful, vivacious Tania "Taani Partner" Gupta (Anushka Sharma) transforms him into the loud and funloving "Raj." It was released worldwide on December 12, 2008.

Chak De! India

Chak De! India

Chak De! India (Hindi: चक दे इंडिया English: "Go For It, India!")is a 2007 Bollywood sports film about field hockey in India. It is directed by Shimit Amin, produced by Yash Raj Films, and stars Shahrukh Khan as Kabir Khan, the former captain of the Indian hockey team. After a disastrous loss to the Pakistani hockey team, Khan is ostracized from the sport. He and his mother are further forced from their ancestral home by angry neighbors. Seven years later in an attempt to redeem himself, Khan becomes the coach for the Indian women's hockey team with the goal of turning its sixteen contentious players into a champion team. After leading the women's team to the Gold, Khan restores his reputation and returns with his mother to their home, welcomed by those who had shunned them years before.

Chak De! India explores religious bigotry, the legacy of partition, ethnic/regional prejudice, and sexism in contemporary India through field hockey.Screenwriter Jaideep Sahni decided to write a fictional screenplay based on the winning of the Gold by the Indian women's field hockey team at the 2002 Commonwealth Games after reading about it in the newspaper.Thus the characters, while inspired by the real team and coaches, were invented by Sahni. Although some media outlets compared Kabir Khan to real-life hockey player Mir Ranjan Negi, Sahani has stated that he was unaware of Negi's tribulations while writing the script and that the resemblance with Negi's life was coincidental.

Earning over Rs 639 million, Chak De! India was the fourth highest grossing movie of 2007 in India and was critically acclaimed.Chak De! India has won numerous awards (including eight for Best Film) and received the National Film Award for Best Popular Film Providing Wholesome Entertainment. The suspension of the Indian Hockey Federation in April, 2008 emphasized the film's influence. After a new hockey council was formed, former hockey player, Aslam Sher Khan, stated in an interview, "We have to make a Team India as you have seen in bollywood blockbuster Chak De! India. There are players from several parts of the country. We have to unite them to make a powerful force