1981-1990

Quote:
The Executioner’s Song is one of the best films about crime and punishment ever made. Far from being lurid or simpleminded, it paints a stark picture of how it must have been to live around Gilmore during that time. It doesn’t glamorize him or turn him into a cardboard villain, but instead depicts him as a man whose inability to handle his growing rage and alienation led him to destroy his life and the lives of those around him. It’s smart enough to know that there can never be a definitive answer as to why someone would commit murder, but that it’s also important to try to understand those reasons nonetheless. It’s also a vital film whatever your views on the issue of capital punishment, as it renders many clichés on the subject useless (and predates the more acclaimed Dead Man Walking by a good thirteen years). Add one of the finest performances of Tommy Lee Jones’ career, and The Executioner’s Song is highly recommended for anyone interested in a thoughtful crime drama.Read More »

A 1981 American animated musical drama film starring Ron Thompson and produced and directed by Ralph Bakshi. The film tells the story of four generations of a Russian Jewish immigrant family of musicians whose careers parallel the history of American popular music.
The majority of the film’s animation was completed through rotoscoping, a process in which live actors are filmed and the subsequent footage is used for animators to draw over. However, the film also uses a variety of other mixed media including water colors, computer graphics, live-action shots, and archival footage.
– WIKIPEDIARead More »

Quote:

The Satin Slipper is a near seven hour metafictional trans-continental theatrical epic, realised by Manoel de Oliveira from the staged period drama of Paul Claudel. It is weighty, inspiring, and exquisitely beautiful. The movie opens with two quotes, which frame the film, regarding the mysterious ways of God, the second of which, “etiam peccata”, “even sins”, is a reference to St Augustine, who added this to a then famous phrase, giving, “Omnia cooperantur in bonum, etiam peccata”, which is to say that everything happens for the glory of God, even sin.

The opening scene contains an exhortation by a dying priest, that his brother, Don Rodrigo, who has given up his studying for the priesthood, in favour of an exploration of power, for yoking the world to his will, be led back onto the path of righteousness, and that his sins be Augustinian in nature. Rodrigo’s journey provides a skeleton for the movie, which however contains numerous supplementary stories and messages.Read More »

Quote:
Samuel Fuller’s throat-grabbing exposé on American racism was misunderstood and withheld from release when it was made in the early eighties; today, the notorious film is lauded for its daring metaphor and gripping pulp filmmaking. Kristy McNichol stars as a young actress who adopts a lost German shepherd, only to discover through a series of horrifying incidents that the dog has been trained to attack black people, and Paul Winfield plays the animal trainer who tries to cure him. A snarling, uncompromising vision, White Dog is a tragic portrait of the evil done by that most corruptible of animals: the human being.Read More »

Synopsis:
When his wife, also working for the the police, but in a different department, is being brutally murdered, a police officer begins to investigate the case on his own. Soon he has the hitwoman, who did it arrested, but must find out that things are not as easy as he thought. He has knocked at the wrong door and it turns out that the woman he has hold of may be his only ally.Read More »

Close to Home
“ In the first part, the camera travels around (West) Berlin like a tourist picking out touristic monuments and describing them in terms of their significance to military history….the commentary charts the bleak history of blockade and the cutting of transport links. The filmmaker reads aloud a letter. She is reading it privately to herself but it is the sound of her reading that makes the connection with the viewer. In the second half (in which the commentary also charts the escalation of land frontier sea and air restrictions), a ferry leaves a quayside and sails into the open Strait, it is an image of freedom but also a melancholy image of parting” Helen De Witt, Visionary Landscapes, 2005Read More »

Late Fassbinder melodrama. In Switzerland German singer ‘Willie’ falls in love with Jewish composer ‘Robert’ who offers resistance to the Nazis by helping refugees. But his family thinks that ‘Willie’ is also a Nazi and may be a risk for them. One day ‘Willie’ helps ‘Robert’ but has to stay in Germany. As Willie starts to sing the song ‘Lili Marleen’ she becomes very famous and every soldier hears that song via radio at 8 pm. Although even Hitler wants to meet her she still does not forget ‘Robert’ and helps to smuggle photos of concentration camps to the free Switzerland. When ‘Robert’ wants to visit her he is captured he can finally get free again but he will never see Willie again until war is over.Read More »

Vicente, seventeen, lives with brother Nino, ten-years-old, and his ailing father in a derelict house on the outskirts of the capital. They don’t seem to remember their mother, and are very much attached to their father, despite his temper, and his frequent absences from home. One day, the father leaves for good, and Vicente and Nino swear to cover it up. It’s their secret. Clara, the primary school assistant, is fascinatingly beautiful, and secretive, and (may be) she knows it aswel. There are other secrets, though: the origin of the money that appears at Vicente’s house; the relationship between Vicente’s well-to-do uncle and his girlfriend; the relationship between the four people who once played the cards together, and now can’t stand each other.Read More »

Hamoon’s wife is leaving him. He is also unsuccessfully trying to finish his Ph.D. thesis. He is forced to reexamine his life. In a series of flashbacks and dreams, Hamoon tries to figure out what he did wrong.Read More »