1971-1980

Synopsis:
There are still water spirits among us. One group lives in Prague, led by Mr. Wassermann, who is using his wife’s family as a servants. All they need is their old house near the river. But the house is to be demolished. They have to stop it. And the only way is to drown Dr. Mrácek, who is responsible for the demolition. But he falls in love with Wassermann’s niece Jana. He changes to fish, is mistaked for water spirit from Germany, is drowned and revived again. The other problem is the flour with ears… and so on…Read More »

A frothy French farce, The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe is a classic madcap comedy about espionage, surveillance and mistaken identity. When Francois (Pierre Richard), an unsuspecting violinist, is misidentified as a superspy by national intelligence, outrageous antics ensue. As everyone (including Mireille Darc, playing a knock-out henchwoman) falls over each other in their misguided attempts to discover the tall blond man’s secrets, his best friend complicates matters even further when he overhears a salacious recording of Francois with his wife. The whole merry-go-round comes crashing to a halt in one final showdown, pitting spy versus supposed spy with hilarious results. Elegantly filmed and accompanied by a memorable score, The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe is one of the most seminal comedies of the 1970s.Read More »

Pithy half-hour documentary concerning New German Cinema (when it was on fire), focusing on and featuring interviews with “the big five”: Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, Volker Schlöndorff & Hans-Jürgen Syberberg

Most notable being the rare interview with a young Herzog, and behind-the-scenes footage of him at work.
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When a police inspector is murdered in hospital, the investigation led by detective Martin Beck uncovers reports of police misconduct and a possible revenge motive.Read More »

Two Swiss girls around twenty, one a history student and the other a store clerk, meet while hitch-hiking. Out of a whim and with nothing better to do, they decide to go on hitch-hiking together around Switzerland as long as they feel like it. After a couple of days, their money is spent in restaurants and cheap hotels, so they continue their tour by sleeping in cattle sheds and asking for money and accommodation from people. An unexpected discovery, a gun found in a car’s glove compartment, gradually turns their methods somewhat more dramatic. Written by Markku Kuoppamäki (IMDB).Read More »

Synopsis
Pipe (Michel Robin) has worked on the same farm for forty of his 66 years of living. Now he is in his “salad” years, and in retirement is free to explore the world in ways he never did before. He buys a small motorcycle with the help of an Italian migrant laborer and begins touring the countryside. Formerly somewhat docile, he gets into scrapes and fights, and eventually loses his cycle. Nonetheless, he has a chance to see the Alps from the sky. He has always wanted to see these legendary mountains, and is disappointed to realize that they are just big piles of rock.Read More »

Quote:
Filmed in 1979, these four short films share a common method: they combine texts written and read by Duras (in voice-over) with images shot by Pierre Lhomme.Read More »

Roger Ebert / May 25, 1997
On the day that Kasparov was defeated by Deep Blue, I found myself thinking of the film “Being There” (1979). The chess champion said there was something about the computer he did not understand, and it frightened him. There were moments when the computer seemed to be . . . thinking. Of course, chess is not a game of thought but of mathematical strategy; Deep Blue has demonstrated it is possible to be very good at it without possessing consciousness.Read More »

(from Cinemarehiyon)
The picaresque adventures of a young, naive country bumpkin named Kulas (de Leon) and his whimsical encounters with denizens of various nationalities – Spanish, American, Chinese, indio – is a metaphor for the Filipino quest for identity at a time when nationhood was still an imagined concept. Set during the liminal period when the Philippines was in transition from Spanish to American colonial rule, this masterwork shows Romero at his best and most exuberant as a filmmaker. It swept most of the awards at the 1976 Metro Manila Film Festival, and was subsequntly voted best picture at the very first Urian Awards in 1977.Read More »