In a city of the too near future, a city designated for desolation, aggression, and political instability, Miguel Galvan (Hugo Soto) is shot accidentally during a demonstration. This time and space provides a back drop to an intriguing sequence of events where three characters try desperately to survive: the wounded Miguel, an antagonistic policeman (Juan Leyrado), and a foolish vigilante smartly acted by rock star Charly Garcia, who also composed the film’s score.Read More »
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The rioting that erupted in 1948 following the assassination of a popular Colombian presidential candidate forms an ever-present background for this drama. In the story, Santiago and his wife Josefina have been confined to their Bogota apartment by the chaos in the streets, which is growing progressively worse. To pass the time, and take her mind off the events outside, Josefina bakes a birthday cake for Laura, a single woman living in an apartment across the street. After the cake is baked, Santiago is barely able to negotiate the unruly crowds to cross the street, but soon sniper fire from the rooftops is adding to the dangers, and he will be unable to return to his home until things calm down considerably. Driven by the agitation all around him, Santiago reveals his inner vision of himself to the spinster as a vital, tango-dancing man of action — romantic and otherwise. While he acts out his fantasies with the willing woman, his wife watches this progression with horrified fascination from across the streetRead More »
A spoof on documentary filmmaking, Frank’s entertaining reflection on truth and fiction stars William Burroughs as the Energy Czar and Robert Downey as a Hollywood agent.Read More »
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Life seems to be good for Shintoto, an up-and-coming rakugo artist who has just had his first sexual experience at a local brothel. Lucky for him, he gets to date the beautiful sex worker he meets that day, and a younger high school rakugo aficionado is also vying for his attention. But for clumsy, heart-on-his-sleeve Shintoto, life doesn’t stay rosy for long.Read More »
A 1985 French documentary film directed by Claude Lanzmann about the Holocaust (also known as the Shoah). The film primarily consists of his interviews with survivors and persons who had experience of the war, and visits to key Holocaust sites across Poland, including three extermination camps. He presents testimony from survivors, witnesses and bystanders, and perpetrators, including some rare interviews with German personnel.
As Claude Lanzmann does not speak Polish, Hebrew or Yiddish, he depended on translators to work with most of his interviewees. This process enlarged the scale of the documentary, which is nine hours and twenty-three minutes long.Read More »
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Father Maurizio, a priest living in a residential college for priests in Rome, and who is having a tormented love story with a young woman (ever beautiful Stefania Sandrelli), is called out one day to “exorcise” the devil from someone. The devil turns out to be in the form of a fun-loving man, who calls himself Giuditta, the name of the fat woman he “possessed”. What Father Maurizio doesn’t know is that this type of devil will turn his life upside down. The devil, quite young and inexperienced, will try to learn his way into this world by imitation, generating havoc to no end.Read More »
Imagine Andrei Tarkovsky circa SOLARIS directing Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and you’ll come close to the existential weirdness of the wonderfully loopy Soviet-era sci-fi comedy KIN-DZA-DZA!Two average Muscovites – a plainspoken construction foreman (Stanislav Lyubshin) and a Georgian violin student (Levan Gabriadze) – encounter an odd homeless man on the street who asks, “Tell me the number of your planet in the Tentura?”In a flash, they’re teleported across the universe to the planet Pluke in the Kin-Dza-Dza galaxy – a Tatooine-like desert world whose inhabitants are hilariously noncommunicative (their main words are “ku” for good and “kyu” for very bad) and where common wooden matches are tremendously valuable. A deadpan, absurdist mixture of Kurt Vonnegut, Monty Python, Samuel Beckett and Jodorowsky’s never-made Dune where alien cultures are even more haphazard and WTF? than our own, the film is also a savage satire of bureaucratic idiocy and dysfunction no matter what political system you’re living under – or what planet you’re living on.Read More »
Whilst investigating a plane crash, a government official meets a strange woman and they spend the night together, but the next day the woman vanishes. Her identity is entwined with the strange object found at the crash site, which she returns for and then vanishes in a bright light.Read More »
Lenny Brown moves to California to find his fortune in tax shelter investments. When the federal government changes the tax laws, poor Lenny finds himself $700,000 in hock with nowhere to turn. His friend, Joel, introduces him to cocaine to give Lenny that needed “boost”. What ensues next is a descent into drug addiction and insanity as Lenny tries to regain control of his life, all the while needing that extra “boost”.Read More »