1981-1990

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In ”Him and Me,” at the Film Forum, James Benning, one of our more highly regarded experimental film makers, appears to be looking back over his life, from the 1950’s to the 80’s, recalling it in terms of public events and private sorrows, landscapes, streets, music and colors.

I emphasize the word ”appears” because ”Him and Me” makes no attempt to be coherent in any conventional sense. The film is composed of dozens of sometimes startlingly beautiful fragments of images and sounds, involving people who are never identified, sometimes accompanied by off-screen voices that may take the form of first-person reminiscences or of inconclusive conversations.Read More »

During the fervently nationalist months leading up to World War II, a rebellious teenager is transferred to a new primary school in a small Inland Sea town. He vies with the school’s reigning bully, who takes a romantic interest in his older stepsister. When they learn she’s going to be sold to a brothel to pay off her father’s debts, they form an uneasy alliance to free her. With surprising moments of caricature and slapstick, Obayashi celebrates the anarchic world of adolescence while also satirizing adult hypocrisy and conformism.Read More »

A cinematic masterpiece produced by the revolutionary 1960s generation inspired by the folk hero myths of Nobel Prize Laureate Naguib Mahfouz. Based on his 1977 novel about the Egyptian ‘urban rabble,’ The Harafish, the film portrays the rise of a people’s hero and his rapid corruption through power. Although set in the late 19th century, ‘The Hunger’ can also be read as a commentary on present day social and political realities.Read More »

This is the Straubs’ film of Hüolderlin’s third attempt at Empedokles’s death.Read More »

from imdb,
“This film is a snapshot of the life of Fred Frith, an English-born multi-instrumentalist, composer, and improvisor. It finds him in Europe, Japan, and the US, working and playing with a variety of avant garde artists.

There is no narrative, or narrator. The images blend with his music, and visa versa, creating a narrative all their own. His performances, widely varied, reveal a light hearted intensity. In one scene, he uses his violin to ‘sing’ with seagulls and, in another, he conducts a quartet. Most of all, it shows him as a human being whose being is infused with music. It pours out of him in all its varied forms, and he welcomes it all.Read More »

Professor Preobrazhensky and his colleague place some human parts into a dog named Sharik. Soon the dog transforms into a human.

Quote:
This movie (and yes, it’s a movie – it was shot as a two-parter, but the two parts together come down to slightly more than 2 hours) is one of the unsung masterpieces of world cinema. A very well-mannered, and yet at the same time absolutely savage denunciation of the Soviet regime and the type of person who flourished under it, the film is a faithful adaptation of the long-banned eponymous book by Mikhail Bulgakov. Read More »

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‘LAUNDRETTE,’ SOCIAL COMEDY SLEEPER
DON’T be put off by the title, which makes it sound like a failed French farce. ”My Beautiful Laundrette,” written by Hanif Kureishi and directed by Stephen Frears, is the first real sleeper of the year.

The film, which opens today at the Embassy 72d Street Theater, is a rude, wise, vivid social comedy about Pakistani immigrants in London, , particularly about the initially naive, university-age Omar (Gordon Warnecke) and Omar’s extended family of wheeler-dealers and unassimilated layabouts.Read More »

Description
Deep in the Transylvanian Alps, the Archangels gold mine is the stage for an epic battle of characters. The arrogant owner is struggling with perceptions of ghosts in the mind of the miners. A maverick free-lance miner is helping him to find the source of terrifying noises that frightened his workers. A story of love, greed and betrayal having the rugged landscape of central Transylvania as a background. With few notable exceptions, everyone seems to have forgotten the biblical “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also (Matthew 6:21)”Read More »

Synopsis:
Donna and Michael are getting married. But first, they have to plan the reception, get the tux, buy the rings, and cope with their own uncertainty about the decision. Michael fears commitment. Donna has her doubts about Michael’s immaturity. Both are getting cold feet.Read More »