1971-1980

Plot Synopsis [AMG]
As much an eccentric character study as a road movie, Michael Cimino’s directorial debut follows the adventures of a quartet of misfits in their life of crime. Retired thief Thunderbolt (Clint Eastwood) and sweet drifter Lightfoot (Jeff Bridges) meet cute when Thunderbolt jumps into Lightfoot’s stolen car to escape a gunman. The pair embarks on an oddball journey to get Thunderbolt’s loot from an old robbery before his former associates, the sadistic Red (George Kennedy) and cretinous Goody (Geoffrey Lewis), get to it first, but all four are too late; the one-room schoolhouse hiding place has apparently vanished. So instead, the four play house and work legit jobs while they plot to rob the same place Thunderbolt and Red hit before. Read More »

Magic is a 1978 psychological horror film starring Anthony Hopkins, Ann-Margret, and Burgess Meredith. It was written by William Goldman, who also wrote the novel on which it was based.Read More »

Richard Dreyfuss put himself on the map with his performance in this movie about how ambition and greed can drive someone at the expense of his own happiness. Duddy Kravitz (Dreyfuss) is an 18-year-old Jewish kid from Montreal whose mother is dead, and whose father drives a cab and does a little pimping on the side to pay the bills and send Duddy’s older brother to medical school. Duddy has bigger dreams, and he does everything from producing films of bar mitzvahs to attempting to buy real estate to (unknowingly) smuggling heroin in order to strike it rich. Along the way, however, he alienates his girlfriend, drives his grandfather to despair, loses all his friends, and even paralyzes his best employee, while making himself more and more miserable. Duddy’s desire to be a success is easy to understand, which makes this potentially unlikable character forgivable, and the film’s gallery of details and characters adds realism and energy to the story. – All Movie GuideRead More »

AMG: In 1971, Jane Fonda and a group of fellow activist performers and musicians (including actor Donald Sutherland, musician Holly Near, and writer and comedian Paul Mooney) put together a satirical revue to perform at coffeehouses and parks near U.S. Army bases for the entertainment of G.I.’s who had come to oppose the war in Vietnam. Calling the show F.T.A. (meaning either “Free The Army” or “F-ck The Army” depending on what part of the show one witnessed), the show included protest songs, anti-war humor, appearances by G.I.’s and veterans who spoke out the war, and agit-prop theater designed to increase awareness and spread resistance against the military escalation in Vietnam. Read More »

Evening Land presents fictitious events in the Europe of those days. It opens in a Copenhagen shipyard with a strike due to the construction of four submarines, potential carriers of nuclear weapons for the French Navy, beside the salary freeze that the deal has entailed, and as an anti-nuclear protest. In parallel with this, a group of radical demonstrators kidnaps the Danish minister of the EC during a summit, as a token of support with the strikers. The Danish police brutally repress the demo and crush the “terrorists”. Evening Land was released to both a hostile left and right wing, and the few film critics who valued it pointed out that it strayed from the style that Watkins had developed in his previous films. Danmarks Radio refused to broadcast it, and Watkins decided it was high time to leave Scandinavia and start what would be a new period of voluntary exile.Read More »

“Blood-red posters featuring portraits of wanted ‘terrorists’ decorated every street wall in occupied France during World War II, and this account of how 23 foreigners working for the Resistance were caught and executed dramatises one of the heroic myths of the Occupation. But Cassenti adopts a radically different perspective from the humanist ‘honesty’ of L’Armée des Ombres or even Lacombe Lucien, and instead attempts a Marxist analysis of the myth and what it means, historically, to re-enact it. As it moves from one level of representation to another with a Brechtian approach to performance, the film occasionally obscures its aims but never fails to challenge the way we receive history in the cinema.” – Time Out Film Guide
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A documentary film about the agricultural development in the region of Gorky: the everyday life in a sovkhoz, the building of a reservoir and of a greenhouse.Read More »

The Back Cover wrote:
The creative team behind If You Don’t Stop It … You’ll Go Blind delivers this uproarious collection of racy sketches. The off-color laughs come fast and furious as the cast spoofs the Lone Ranger and Tonto, nudist colonies and the legal system. Along the way, there’s an important lesson in bus-riding courtesy. The dirty-minded players include Vic Dunlop and Judy Mazel; watch closely for a young Robin Williams.Read More »

Synopsis:
Coban and his four comrades are smugglers who live in the bleak, inaccessible mountains. They are hard, pitiless men like the county they live in, whose daily commerce is in greed, danger, betrayal and murder.Read More »