Plot:
Ray Winkler is a “small time crook” with big dreams. Recruiting his wife and some fellow bumblers, he leaves his job as a dishwasher to open a cookie store next to a bank. And while his wife operates the cookie store, he and his cohorts work in the basement on breaking into the bank. Wealth comes from an unexpected direction, helping fulfill his dreams. But there is an ancient curse about getting everything you wish for.Read More »
Writer and director Woody Allen returns to the Manhattan of the past with this romantic comedy set in 1940, the era of fedora hats and gumshoe detectives. Allen stars as C.W. Briggs, an insurance investigator whose razor-sharp instincts have just led to the successful conclusion of another case, the recovery of a stolen Picasso. While he’s a valued employee, Briggs is under fire from efficiency expert Betty Ann Fitzgerald (Helen Hunt) for his antiquated attitudes and refusal to accept modern crime-solving techniques such as fingerprinting. C.W. claims he puts himself directly into the criminal mind, a skill that will do him no good when he and Betty Ann are hypnotized at a Rainbow Room gathering one night by the magician Volton (David Ogden Stiers). As a parlor trick to entertain their co-workers, Volton makes C.W. and Betty Ann believe they’re a couple that’s deeply in love. But the performer secretly keeps up the ruse after the party’s over, calling C.W. to whisper a magic code word and ordering the detective to rob wealthy homes with security systems that C.W. himself has designed. With no memory of his thieving activities, a frustrated C.W. can’t solve the high-profile jewel burglaries, while he and Betty Ann struggle with their odd new attraction for each other, made more complicated by the fact that Betty Ann is romantically involved with their boss (Dan Aykroyd).
— Karl Williams @ allmovie.comRead More »
Description: Narrated by Tom Cruise, “Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures” goes through each one of his movies and talks to various participants about their memories of working with Kubrick. For those who know very little about Kubrick, the documentary is an excellent career overview.Read More »
Quote:
For my money, Abel Ferrara’s remake of a remake — namely Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, based on Don Siegel’s classically paranoid 1956 SF adaptation of Jack Finney’s effective novel The Body Snatchers — doesn’t match the Siegel original, though it’s a lot scarier and more memorable than Kaufman’s low-key, new-agey version. Kaufman shifted the action from a small California town to San Francisco, while Ferrara–shooting a script by Stuart Gordon, Dennis Paoli, and Nicholas St. John from a screen story by Raymond Cistheri and Larry Cohen — locates the action in an Army compound in Alabama. Read More »
Plot:Director Abel Ferrara applies his eccentric vision to the vampire genre with this cerebral “Art”film about graduate philosophy student Kathleen Conklin (Lili Taylor), who is bitten by anaggressive female vampire (Annabella Sciorra) and soon spirals into a nightmarish world ofblood addiction and existential angst. Driven by her merciless condition, she attacks severalof her pretentious friends and classmates (even her professor) and mainlines their blood likeheroin. Just as she becomes more bold in seeking prey on the streets of New York, she iswaylaid by a potential victim — actually a sophisticated vampire himself named Peina(Christopher Walken), who chooses to control his own blood addiction through fasting andmeditation.Read More »
Rarely seen Béla Tarr short, starring composer anc Sátántangó lead actor Víg Mihály. shot on many some of the same locations as Sátántangó.Read More »
This film documents Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s 1996 concert tour. Jim Jarmusch interviews the band about their long history, and we see backstage footage from the 1970s and 1980s.
If you’re a Neil Young fan, you will love this movie. The music is outstanding, almost mind-altering in it’s depth and beauty. Yes, I call it beautiful even though it’s raw and riotous, even though it’s crude and vulgar, even though it sometimes feels like the harrowing of hell, it’s beautiful music. Young’s music is incomparable and his live performance shows you what an artist looks like when he’s under the influence of his muse. He gives a succinct insight into his vision of true rock music: it never gets comfortable, it never gets tame, it never gets easy. Neil Young is in a class with Bob Dylan and Keith Jarrett: artists completely dedicated to their work. I highly recommend this movie. Jarmusch does an incredible job of combining 3 decades worth of footage into this 1996 tour. The interview with Jim Jarmusch and Young is very interesting: two artists talking about what they do.Read More »
Emma has moved to Budapest from the countryside with her good friend Böbe, and both of them have taken jobs as schoolteachers. However, their wages are pitifully small, and all they can afford in the way of housing is a shared room in a boarding house near the airport. The two women have settled into their lives, but it isn’t easy: Emma’s sexual affair with the school’s married principal is not emotionally satisfying, and Böbe’s penchant for picking up foreigners and bringing them back to their room for sex creates unpleasant situations, to say the least. At school, it used to be clear what the quickest route to success was, but now that the “communists” are no longer in power, a lot of the senior people are floundering in uncertainty. Eventually, Emma gains the courage to strike out on her own. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie GuideRead More »
SYNOPSIS:
Against a plain, unchanging blue screen, a densely interwoven soundtrack of voices, sound effects and music attempt to convey a portrait of Derek Jarman’s experiences with AIDS, both literally and allegorically, together with an exploration of the meanings associated with the colour blue.Read More »