Lucas has invented a new computer language but at the same time he has been informed about his strange terminal illness during which he has been gradually losing his memory. Shortly after that he meets Blanche who acts as a medium in a bizarre traveling show. Dying Lucas follows her to the sea resort where they spend together several days and nights.Read More »
John Huston and the Dubliners is a valentine to the late director and a relatively standard production film about his making of The Dead. Much time is devoted to the actors’ understandably admiring comments about Mr. Huston, and to the disposition of the prop department’s fake snow. The film has the potential to seem ordinary, but it becomes touched with magic whenever the director makes his presence felt. Mr. Huston displays his characteristic gallantry and his keen attention to seemingly unimportant touches (”Don’t worry about what you say, just keep talking,” he tells one actor, and gives precise instructions for reading the line ”Would you please pass the celery?”). He describes The Dead as ”lacework,” and this film makes the aptness of that description very clear.Read More »
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From the panoramic, historical revue of the many faces of social prejudice and ostracism, Ottinger turns her attention to the mechanism of exclusion invested with the necessary power to make or break people. Frau Dr. Mabuse, whose illustrious precursor is Fritz Lang’s psychopathic, counterfeiting boss of the underworld, derives her power from the fabrication of reality based on the seduction of images and words. Her perfect object and victim is the Bauhaus-dandy Dorian, whose relation to Oscar Wilde’s prototype is as marginal as his relation to power. The fairy-tale framework of Ottinger’s feature compositions asserts itself strongly in this film as Dorian replaces the evil tycoon and becomes king of the media conglomerate.Read More »
Starring Ahmed Zaki and Mervat Amin, the film’s importance comes from it’s storyline written by Raouf Tawfik, it discusses a bold and sensitive subject for Middle Eastern societies, the concept of power and it’s relationship with the individual. The films that have discussed this subject in earnest are rare and in between especially in Egyptian cinema, because of censorship and intimidation, and even the films that have previously discussed the issue of authority and power abuse have only touched it from a political view, ignoring the psychological aspects.
The wife of an Important man stands in opposition to this school of thought.
In the film, we are shown two of the most important characters in Khan’s filmography.Read More »
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1938, in a French African colony. Lucien Cordier is the cop of this village, populated with blacks and a few whites (usually racialist and lustful). He is a washout, everyone (including his wife Huguette) humiliates him. He never arrests anyone and looks at elsewhere when a dirty trick occurs. But one day, he turns into a Machiavellian exterminating angel.Read More »
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Birdy is a 1984 American drama film based on William Wharton’s 1978 novel of the same name. Directed by Alan Parker, it stars Matthew Modine and Nicolas Cage. Set in 1960s Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the film focuses on the friendship between two teenage boys, Birdy (Modine) and Al Columbato (Cage). The story is presented in flashbacks, with a frame narrative depicting their traumatic experiences upon serving in the Vietnam War.Read More »
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A journalist is assigned to interview an eccentric anthropologist who has exhumed the skeleton of Jörg Jenatsch, a revered freedom fighter who was mysteriously murdered in 1639. Initially disinterested, the journalist begins to uncover un flattering truths about the national hero and experiences visions in which he seems to be witnessing events that transpired over 300 years ago. As he obsessively pursues the investigation, his personal life and his grip on reality disintegrate, drawing him relentlessly toward the fatal carnival at which Jenatsch was killed.Read More »
An engineer in charge of the production line of a factory in Moscow is sent to a small town to try to specify the distributor the new dimensions of a mechanic part they need. But in this town everybody seems to be crazy (a secretary who works naked, a group of people take the engineer as a rock & roll player, etc) and, in addition, this man is witness of a suicide, so he is trapped inside the town.Read More »
Inspired in form by American police TV shows and soap operas, The Golden Boat is a madcap, surreal dash through the streets of New York city, telling the mysterious and often hilarious story of an aged street-person named Austin, a comically compulsive assassin, as he joins up with a young rock critic and philosophy student named Israel Williams. In the course of their adventures, Austin pursues his object of desire – a Mexican soap opera star – and along the way engages a host of TV characters and bit players, whose repartee range from gangsterish insults to the question of God’s existence.Read More »