1991-2000

This tense urban drama stars Nicolas Cage as Frank Pierce, a paramedic on the brink of physical and emotional collapse. Frank has worked for years in one of New York’s most brutal neighborhoods, and the pressure of his job has taken its toll; plagued with self-doubt, he is haunted by the spirits of the people he couldn’t save, and while he desperately wants to quit his job, outside forces won’t let him walk away. Bringing Out the Dead brought director Martin Scorsese back to the streets of contemporary New York, one of his favorite locations, after three films set elsewhere: Kundun, Casino, and The Age of Innocence. The film also reunited Scorsese with screenwriter Paul Schrader, who scripted Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and The Last Temptation of Christ. The supporting cast includes Patricia Arquette as the daughter of a heart attack victim that Frank has fallen in love with, and John Goodman and Ving Rhames as two of Frank’s fellow drivers. — Mark DemingRead More »

The story of James Whale, the director of Frankenstein (1931) and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), in the time period following the Korean War. Whale is homosexual and develops a friendship with his gardener, an ex-Marine.Read More »

The story shows Emma’s and Böbe’s fight for survival, for keeping their position in society which they achieved with hard work in the previous regime. They don’t want to lose their place and become village girls again.Read More »

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For those interested in Chinese cinema, here is something a bit different.
Centre Stage is about the life of Ruan Lingyu, Chinese silent movie legend of the 1930s. She was without equal in the depiction of the emotions of a woman seeking independence. Students worshipped her as a cult symbol. Men looked at her with dreamy eyes, and women looked at her sideways and full of hate. Her roles were typically of characters like girl student, rustic maid, factory hand, prostitute, socialite, and authoress. Ruan’s personal life often mirrored those of the tragic characters she portrayed on screen.
The recreation of sets, costumes and inclusion of original footage from films that have survived in which Ruan appeared have combined to produce a high quality and stylish film, giving the viewer a docudrama about an interesting woman from an interesting period of Chinese film history.Read More »

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Cheryl is young, Black, and lesbian, working in Philadelphia with her best friend Tamara and consumed by a film project: to make a video about her search for a Black actress from Philly who appeared in films in the 30s and was known as the Watermelon Woman. Following various leads, Cheryl discovers the Watermelon Woman’s stage name and real name and surmises that the actress had a long affair with Martha Page, a White woman and one of Hollywood’s few female directors. As she’s discovering these things, Cheryl becomes involved with Diana, who’s also White. The affair strains Cheryl’s friendship with Tamara. More discoveries bring Cheryl (and us, her audience) to new realizations.Read More »

Kurt and Lydia are planning a relaxed vacation at the Gripsholm castle in Sweden . What Lydia does not know is that for Kurt, a well-known publicist, the journey is actually a flight from encroaching fascism and a direct threat from the Nazis.

The film takes us deep into the shady, pleasure-seeking cabaret world of Berlin at the beginning of the 1930’s, where “open season” has been declared on the last remaining bourgeois taboos, and the few remaining fig leaves of modesty are about to be swept away. Kurt, a campaigning journalist and satirist who has become a celebrity thanks to the rather saucy lyrics he has written for the songs of various shows has set off with his girlfriend Lydia, his princess, on a journey to Gripsholm castle in Sweden, in the course of a seemingly endless summer. Two friends, the fashionable variety show singer Billie and a temperamental aviator who goes by the name of Karlchen join them briefly on the holiday in Sweden. Erotic impulses inevitably lead to complications in their relationships.Read More »

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Ryuich, the survivor when bombing in Nagasaki has the amazing document of those tragic at the order, it is record of explosion of an atomic bomb on August 9, 1945 11:02. He has made this record at five-year age on the tape recorder of the father. The sound of a bomb injures mentality of the young man, causes him almost physical pain, but gradually he finds in is mute also a consolation. Over time Ryuichi becomes we will gain the idea to recreate this awful sound that his mind and its life threatens.Read More »

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The saga of an Armenian family that immigrated to France after the break-up of the oppressive Ottoman Empire.Read More »

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In “La perdición de los hombres”, Ripstein once again enters the world of misery, though his characters are not precisely outcasts as the fat nurse and her gigolo lover. This time he returns to his early free-style -it’s even in black and white-, as he tells the stories of normal people, who choose weird solutions to their predicaments and whose dreams occupy the same space and tone as their daily actions on the screen. Garciadiego rarely paints a “nice” male character. So here there are not only one but three machos, who play baseball and believe that man’s downfall is personified in women (in fact, the movie’s title is a verse from a popular ranchera that goes “Man’s downfall / Is the damned woman”). Garciadiego built her story a la “Pulp Fiction”, with the first act told after the resolution, so one has to wait quite a bit to know why two of the guys kill their pal, known as the “King of the Baseball Diamond”, while his widow fights for his corpse with his younger and prettier lover.Read More »