1981-1990

Year 1945. The second World War is over and the soldiers from the sisbanded army are returning home. Yet there is still no sign of Joze Malek. His wife Mimika and their children Tincek and olga know only that he had deserted the German army and gone over to the Soviet Red Army. Mimika works a a hired hand for the farmer, Medved, who givesher bread and milk for her child instead of regular wages. This is not at all to the liking of her relative Vanc. One fine day, father Malek comes home and the family is happilly reunited. Vanc tells Jozeabout the agrarian reform, through which the Maleks even get their own plot of land. In exchange of this, they have to remove all the religious symbols from their home.Read More »

This story, that takes place during one day, tells about male meanness and ever-hard female destiny… The action takes place against the background of the first hits of the young group “Nautilus Pompilius”…

The first professional work of the director Alexey Balabanov, who at that time worked as an assistant at the Sverdlovsk Film Studio. The film was a teaching work, filmed while studying at the Higher Courses of Scriptwriters and Directors.Read More »

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Radiating from the Darwinian text-fragments outward through the material is much pictorial and spoken signifying text having to do with issues such as communication, translation, dynamics of perception, art, science, isolation and social interaction etc. In a certain sense a meaning does arise from all of this. At the same time the endless groupings and regroupings of material suggest yet another realm of meaning. Finally it is the experience of our own selection of a pattern among the myriad richness of combining materials, superimposed on my own composed pattern, that opens up the real film–L. G.Read More »

Plot: This brooding, enigmatic story won the 1989 Prix George Sadoul at the Cannes Film Festival, in the category “Un Certain Regard,” which focuses on “smaller” films. In the story, Gerard (Jacques Spiesser) and his wife Annie (Sandrine Bonnaire) have made a nice life for themselves on their farm. That life is disturbed by the arrival of Gerard’s older brother Roland (Jean-François Stévenin) – a brother Annie never knew existed. It gradually becomes clear that both brothers had once negligently set fire to a barn while drunk, inadvertently causing the death of a sleeping wanderer. Roland took all the blame for causing the death, and spent ten years in prison for it. Now he wants Gerard to make those years up to him. Gerard, who up until then had succeeded in putting the incident out of his mind, is now consumed by guilt, and, since he loves both his brother and his wife, doesn’t know what to do about those demands. Not only that, but he is a little bit afraid of Roland. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie GuideRead More »

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Marlon Riggs, with assistance from other gay Black men, especially poet Essex Hemphill, celebrates Black men loving Black men as a revolutionary act. The film intercuts footage of Hemphill reciting his poetry, Riggs telling the story of his growing up, scenes of men in social intercourse and dance, and various comic riffs, including a visit to the “Institute of Snap!thology,” where men take lessons in how to snap their fingers: the sling snap, the point snap, the diva snap. The film closes with obituaries for victims of AIDS and archival footage of the civil rights movement placed next to footage of Black men marching in a gay pride parade.Read More »

A 1982 Soviet drama film directed by Vadim Abdrashitov and written by Aleksandr Mindadze. The last role of actor Anatoly Solonitsyn. Before the official premiere the film was shown in spring of 1982 at the Concert Hall of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.

This movie is a typical exanple of a production drama, a type of movies associated with artistic representation in cinema (mainly in the USSR) of social relations of participants in the sphere of industrial (agricultural, resource-mining, and so on) production. They were very popular in Soviet Union from 1930s till late 1980s.Read More »

This is the R-rated version of the hardcore sex film Dixie Ray, Hollywood Star. It’s of somewhat historical significance as being one of the few porno films to feature a name Hollywood actor: Cameron Mitchell. Mitchell doesn’t have any sex scenes (thankfully), but he plays a gangster boss (much like his role in My Favorite Year) in this 1940s-set period film. Star John Leslie (who does have sex scenes) plays a detective who is hired by a former movie star to find some “indiscreet” photographs of her.Read More »

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Private eye Al Pereira was one of Jess Franco’s recurring characters – in fact, maybe his only recurring hero. A genuine noir type who always accepts cases he should have let pass, who always loses his heart to the wrong floozy fatales, who usually comes out of a case worse than he went in, he was introduced in 1962’s “077 Operacion Jamaique” with Conrado San Martin playing the part. Then Eddie Constantine took Al around the block in 1965’s “Attack of the Robots,” followed by Howard Vernon in 1972’s “Les Ebranlées” and Olivier Mathot in 1975’s “Midnight Party.” After two test drives as a similar character named Al Crosby in “La chica de las bragas transparentes” (1981) and “La noche de los sexos abiertos” (1983), Antonio Mayans resurrected the role and became its definitive interpreter in this movie. It was followed by four other adventures – the last being Franco’s very last film, the recently released “Al Pereira vs. the Alligator Ladies” (2013).Read More »

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A monumental work of scholarship on one of the most important and neglected areas of film history, Richard Abel’s massive study is already clearly destined to occupy a position of deserved pre-eminence in relation to all foreseeable future work done on this seminal period in French cinema. At once a work of critical synthesis and a compendium of infor-mation containing much original research, it remains indispensible less for its overall critical argument than for its wealth of data, making it more valuable as a reference source than as a “definitive” history. The book is divided into four sections, any one of which contains enough important material to constitute a significant book in its own right: “The French Film Industry,” “The Commercial Narrative Film,” “The Alternative Cinema Network”and “The Narrative Avant-Garde.” — Jonathan RosenbaumRead More »