1981-1990

Synopsis
A father’s ex-girlfriend resurfaces after a 10-year absence wanting to take her son away from him. With his world shattered, he must decide between what is best for his son and his own future happiness.Read More »

Exerpts from the NY Times review December 11, 1981

To get quickly to the point, Four Friends is the best film yet made about the sixties, that harrowed time of war, prosperity, and broken promises, of turning on and dropping out to colors described as psychedelic, when establishment came to be written with a capital “E.”
Four Friends, directed by Arthur Penn and written by Steven Tesich, initially suggests a sort of big-budget The Return of the Secaucus Seven. It’s a film that embraces the looks, sounds, speech, and public events of the sixties, but not in the way of a documentary. It has the quality of legend, a fable remembered. Because Mr. Penn and Mr. Tesich see everything in terms of legend, even a tumultuously funny barroom brawl near the film’s end becomes not only a brawl but also a revivifying re-creation of all barroom brawls in all of the Western films the four friends grew up with.Read More »

In order to buy a horse, a man wanders in the bazaars of Thessaly. His journey will take him further than he imagines, as old prophets, forgotten witches and vampire princes will find himself on his way.Read More »

Synopsis:
During his lifetime, Vincent Van Gogh (Tim Roth) has no greater champion of his work than his devoted brother, Theo (Paul Rhys). As an art gallery owner, Theo pushes for the recognition that Van Gogh’s masterpieces deserve, only to meet with abject failure. While Van Gogh struggles with obscurity and mental illness, Theo faces serious financial difficulties due to poor sales. Eventually, both the Van Gogh brothers begin falling apart over the reality of their unrealized dreams.Read More »

In an avant-garde attempt to explore widely disparate, unconnected subjects dealing with topics as diverse as sex, a broken marriage, artists’ housing in New York, and Central American politics, director Yvonne Rainer meanders through a lot of philosophical and rhetorical territory. In the end, the voyage may be too much for most viewers, although certain segments of the film stand out as quite successful.Read More »

During a police strike in Nova Scotia’s capital city, a gang of hoodlums end up unintentionally causing the owner of a gay bar to be killed. This escalates into a string of murders with a lone survivor trying to not be next.Read More »

In “Landscape Suicide” Benning continues his examination of Americana through the stories of two murderers. Ed Gein was a Wisconsin farmer and multiple murderer who taxidermied his victims in the 1950s. Bernadette Prott was a California teenager who stabbed a friend to death over an insult in 1984. Benning’s distanced approach to such grisly material is as far removed as possible from sensationalism, however. Although the acts of murder are both bizarre and violent, Benning dwells on them only minimally, emphasizing instead the details of psychological motivation, which in both cases seem frighteningly mundane. Benning has created a script which is a masterpiece of understated colloquial writing, and the actors he employs to re-enact confessional testimony and incidents recounted in trial transcripts perform with a flatly convincing lack of affect reminiscent of Gary Gilmore. Read More »

The film depicts a man and a girl with the sensibility and body of a wolf who threaten a city of people who live like sheep under control.Read More »

Sally, a 28-year-old social worker who has just broken up from a ten-year marriage. She seeks freedom, but has trouble living alone. She soon finds a new man, lawyer Jonas, but Sally knows that the past is chasing her and do things more difficult for her freedom quest.Read More »