1981-1990

Kamata kôshinkyoku (1982)
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The English title Fall Guy is fitting – this is a film about a stuntman who takes several plunges for his movie star friend – but there’s a clever touch of subversion in the less obvious Japanese title. Kamata Koshin-Kyoku refers to Shochiku studio’s theme song. But this film about the production of a samurai epic on the Toei studio lot in Kyoto is hardly a fawning tribute to the world of cinema. It’s a film by Kinji Fukasaku. Like the director’s masterpiece, Battles Without Honor and Humanity, Fall Guy exposes the injustices visited on honest, hard-working men serving corrupt and undeserving bosses; all he has done is change the setting. In the place of low-ranking yakuza are stuntmen, the foot soldiers of the entertainment industry. In the place of Japan’s criminal underground is a movie set.Read More »

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Shades (1985)

“Unfolding buildings drawn across the screen in spectrums of grey reflecting buildings in their surfaces cutting the sky into triangles.”
Jim JenningsRead More »

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A decade after he broke through with Breaker Morant, Australian director Bruce Beresford made another acclaimed film about the effects of colonialism on the individual. In a performance that earned him the Berlin Film Festival’s Silver Bear for best actor, Maynard Eziashi plays the title character, a Nigerian villager eager to work as a civil servant for the British authorities, including a sympathetic district officer (Pierce Brosnan), in the hope that it will benefit him in the future. Instead, his ambition leads to his tragic downfall. Mister Johnson, based on the 1939 novel by Joyce Cary, is a graceful, heartfelt drama about the limits of idealism, affectingly acted and handsomely shot.Read More »

Sex. Money. Kinky Customers. Lunch. For These Girls, It’s All In A Day’s Work.

A day in the life of several sex workers in an upscale Manhattan brothel. The film is a stark portrayal of the women, the male customers and the motivations of both. Watch as the madam manipulates her “girls”. Watch as she answers the phone by saying “Hello John, what’s new and different?” Watch as the “johns” try to manipulate the “girls”. Part nudie exploitation, part sociological thesis.Read More »

Emanuelle lives in London where almost everything in the realm of erotic is available. Her friend Kate becomes a nude revue show to help her husband pay the bills.Read More »

The semi-autobiographical film on director Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s childhood and adolescence, when he was growing up in Taiwan, living through the deaths of his father, mother and grandmother.Read More »

A housewife in Nazi-occupied France struggles to make ends meet when her husband returns home after being wounded in the war.

Letterboxd reviews
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★★★★½ Added by marcricov 03 Jul 2020

Leave it up to Isabelle Huppert to perform abortions and shelter prostitutes while dealing with a drunken husband and parenting two kids alone during World War II. Ha! This woman never ceases to amaze me. An outstanding performance wrapped in an important story.Read More »

Starring the dependable Pierre Arditi with a very bad case of unshakable hangdog expression, as well as Jean Reno, Pierre Jolivet’s first movie as a director (he had also co-written “Le Dernier Combat” with Luc Besson) , “Strictement Personnel” is – in some ways – a typical paranoid French thriller, in which the main character gets reunited with his estranged family, with some not-altogether-successful dream flashes.Read More »

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According to Hernández, the banner of the Cannes Festival shows its three premises: glory, money and politics. He presented a film on that date and makes Citron pressé au Blue Bar as a critic and a newspaper at the same time.

If you film the banal, the naive and the superficial of the atmosphere in Cannes at that time, it is for nothing more than to rescue the beauty of the water of its sea.Read More »