1991-2000

Ladybird, Ladybird
BY ROGER EBERT / January 20, 1995
Ladybug, ladybug, Fly away home.
Your house is on fire, And your children will burn.

Nursery rhyme This is the story of a troublesome woman. A woman with a big heart and a big temper, who has had four children by four different fathers, and lost custody of all of them because she cannot function responsibly. Or, looking at it differently, it is the story of a woman persecuted by British social workers who slap her down every time she almost has her life together. The strength of the film is that there is truth to both interpretations: Yes, she is treated cruelly by social workers – and, yes, she is her own worst enemy.Read More »

Plot Synopsis
Definitely not to be confused with the 1949 Paramount release starring William Holden or the Larry McMurtry 1995 television mini-series, this 20 minute unfinished “western” marked the first helpless Hollywood effort of legendary bad filmmaker Edward J. Wood, Jr. Together with a friend, 18-year-old John Crawford Thomas, the 23-year-old Wood produced his little epic in 16 mm on a one-day shooting schedule at the Iverson Ranch in Chatsworth, California, apparently blowing Thomas’ inheritance in the process. A few other scenes ere filmed several weeks later in Griffith Park, but then Wood ran out of funds or acquaintances with ready cash (a recurring problem for the young auteur). Read More »

Quote:
Greek Sea, World War II. An Italian ship leaves a handful of soldiers in a little island; their mission is to spot enemy ships and to hold the island in case of attack. The village of the island seems abandoned and there isn’t a single enemy in sight, so the soldiers begin to relax a little. Things change when their ship is hit and destroyed by the enemy, and the soldiers find themselves abandoned there. Actually, the island isn’t deserted and when the Greeks understand that those Italians are harmless, they came out of their hiding places in the mountains and continue their peaceful lives. Soon the soldiers discover that being left behind in a God-forgotten Greek island isn’t such a bad thing, after all…Read More »

Quote:
For the extraordinarily beautiful second film in his Fontainhas trilogy, Pedro Costa jettisoned his earlier films’ larger crews to burrow even deeper into the Lisbon ghetto and the lives of its desperate inhabitants. With the intimate feel of a documentary and the texture of a Vermeer painting, In Vanda’s Room takes an unflinching, fragmentary look at a handful of self-destructive, marginalized people, but is centered around the heroin-addicted Vanda Duarte. Costa presents the daily routines of Vanda and her neighbors with disarming matter-of-factness, and through his camera, individuals whom many would deem disposable become vivid and vital. This was Costa’s first use of digital video, and the evocative images he created remain some of the medium’s most astonishing.—The Criterion CollectionRead More »

Puskás started his career in Hungary playing for Kispest and Budapest Honvéd. He was top scorer in the Hungarian League on four occasions, and in 1948, he was the top goal scorer in Europe. During the 1950s, he was both a prominent member and captain of the Hungarian national team, known as the Mighty Magyars. In 1958, two years after the Hungarian Revolution, he emigrated to Spain where he played for Real Madrid.Read More »

First Amenabar movie, made in 1991 (not 1992 as IMDb states), when Amenabar was 19.
The later `Tesis` is based on the same idea (obsession?).Read More »

Quote:
Spanish director and scriptwriter Alejandro Amenábar has gotten a fair amount of attention in the English-speaking world of late, and well-deserved it is. At the moment, he is probably best known for directing The Others, as well as directing and writing Open Your Eyes (Abre los ojos), the outstanding film that spawned a totally unnecessary remake in Vanilla Sky. Amenábar’s film Thesis (original title: Tesis) takes us back to 1996, where we can see that his success is no fluke: it has been in the cards from the beginning.Read More »

“In the Presence of a Clown (Swedish: Larmar och gör sig till) is a television film by Ingmar Bergman, recorded for Swedish television in 1997 with Bergman as a director. It was screened in the Un Certain Regard section of the 1998 Cannes Film Festival. It tells the story of a professor named Carl, who has been found guilty of attempted murder and sentenced to treatment in a mental ward. In the hospital he befriends a man named Osvald, and they attempt to make and promote a film.

The film was produced for Sveriges Television from Bergman’s 1994 play of the same title. “Read More »

Synopsis:
A lurid thriller that mixes the erotic with the fantastic, NAKED POISON is the story of Ah Man, a loner who has only one human friend, his coworker Ling, and who spends most of his time with his pet lizards and snakes. When Ah Man discovers how to harness his reptiles’ power to create serums that can…
A lurid thriller that mixes the erotic with the fantastic, NAKED POISON is the story of Ah Man, a loner who has only one human friend, his coworker Ling, and who spends most of his time with his pet lizards and snakes. When Ah Man discovers how to harness his reptiles’ power to create serums that can give him strange powers, Ah Man begins to grow obsessed. When his deranged obsession alerts Ling that something is wrong, she puts herself at risk to save him.Read More »