1991-2000

Summary:
“Country boy Shuisheng (Wang Xiaoxiao) is brought to 1930s Shanghai by his uncle who wants the boy to become a member of the powerful gang ruled by manipulative Tang (Li Baotian). In fact, Shuisheng will serve Tang’s capricious mistress Bijou (Gong Li), a nightclub singer whom the boss proclaimed “the Queen of Shanghai.” When the boy’s uncle and the gang’s several other members die during a rival gang’s unsuccessful attempt on Tang’s life, the latter retreats to a remote small island, taking both Bijou and Shuisheng with him and thinking of revenge.Read More »

allmovie:
This Dutch film, based upon the classic 19th century S&M novel, chronicles the relationship between a dominatrix and her slave. Much of the soundtrack includes works by Mahler and Tchaikovsky. Wanda has a number of sado-masochistic encounters with Severin in a variety of locations including a crypt. In the end, he is left branded by another man while she leaves with a woman.Read More »

SYNOPSIS:
Selma is a Czechoslovakian immigrant, a single mother working in a factory in rural America. Her salvation is
her passion for music, specifically, the all-singing, all-dancing numbers found in classic Hollywood musicals.
Selma harbors a sad secret: she is losing her eyesight and her son Gene stands to suffer the same fate if she
can’t put away enough money to secure him an operation. When a desperate neighbor falsely accuses Selma
of stealing his savings, the drama of her life escalates to a tragic finale.

Nominated for 1 Oscar. Another 28 wins & 34 nominations Read More »

Quote:
In common with many of Benoit Jacquot’s films, Pas de scandale is an intensely sombre character study centred around one person experiencing a mid-life crisis. This time, his subject is a company executive who is attempting to rebuild his life after serving a prison sentence which has destroyed not just his public reputation but his self confidence.Read More »

Quote:
This nouveau, sleekly produced film features the story of a unique lesbian S&M relationship between a mistress and her maid. Enter their fantasy: a seductive chain of nostalgically hot images, shocking, amusing and dripping with sexual perversion. The masquerade of dominance and submission is performed in the spirit of decadence, sexual freedom and spiritual abandonment. Goddess Rosemary is a hypnotic dancer with a beautiful body who seduces and punishes her Kitty. She knows how to snap the desire, feed the soul and materialize the unrelenting passion of kitty. This ‘post-modern romantic subversion’ shows fetish, fantasy and role-playing, mutual female masturbation, bare-bottom spanking, spike heel and foot worship in a totally new and classic approach to lesbian S&M erotica. One fetish sequence after another sucks you in on a tide, pulls you along in a climactic ride into the dream sequence finale.Read More »

Quote:
A daring exploration of the fine line between fantasy and reality, art & erotica…

The mysterious world of the senses that Maria inhabits is one of complete surrender to the wills and whims of the hypnotically intense Mistress Morgana, and the exotic, ambiguous creature, TV Sabrina. The brooding aura of total sexual abandon is present in every gesture, every slap, & caress in this theatre of passion. The flame of the candle that illuminates and torments, reveals the wondrous form of the willing slave, whose haunting wide eyes and full moist parted lips recall the classic silent screen goddesses Pola Negri, Louise Brooks…but they never dared reveal themselves so totally, so openly to the camera’s eager and demanding gaze. This visionary noir exercise examines and crosses the boundaries of dominance and submission in its artful escalation of pleasure & pain, bondage & menace, fetishism & foot worship; culminating in the hot wax torture of the slave’s most private parts…
…as she writhes in ecstasy.Read More »

The Sea That Thinks is a 2000 Dutch experimental film directed by Gert de Graaff. The film makes heavily use of optical illusions to tell a “story within a story” revolving around a screenwriter writing a script called The Sea That Thinks. The script details what is happening around him and eventually begins to affect what happens around him.Read More »

AMG: Lisa Cholodenko wrote and directed this lesbian-themed drama, winner of the 1998 Sundance Film Festival’s Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. Ambitious photography magazine associate editor Syd (Radha Mitchell) has a ho-hum relationship with James (Gabriel Mann). Investigating a ceiling leak, she enters the apartment of her neighbor, retired photographer Lucy Berliner (Ally Sheedy), who lives with former Fassbinder actress Greta (Patricia Clarkson), a heroin addict. The friendship between the worldly Lucy and the naive, insecure Syd ripens into an affair, one destined to change the lives of both women.Read More »

A young, naive and enthusiastic theater director named Kai comes to a grim provincial town to put on Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Although the lethargic theater company shows no interest in the play, his spirit remains undaunted. Meanwhile, it is fall 1989. The world is changing and somewhere, far away in the capital, a revolution is taking place and it seems that wishes might come true. Great hopes emerge in the little town and unexpected events overtake Kai’s mutating production.
—DEFA Film LibraryRead More »