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An artist takes inspiration from the rain outside.Read More »

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Based on a true story, this film focuses on three Polish labourers of vastly different social, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds. Unlike many of their recalcitrant contemporaries, the three men overcome their differences and work together. Eventually they create a textile factory founded upon the edicts of equality, trust, and respect.Read More »

In Rome, Cora is a waitress at a club, walks people’s dogs, sleeps with various men, kips with pals, and has a salty tongue. She also has a bruised history: her mother’s suicide, her brother’s mental illness. Ada, a dog-owning client, hires her to follow Ada’s aged and courtly father every day. The dad, a retired philology professor, has a touch of dementia, sometimes forgetting where he is; Cora is to keep him in sight, phoning Ada if the professor has difficulties. On the third day, he takes a train out of Rome, and Cora follows on what proves to be a journey into her best and worst selves. She becomes his traveling companion, but what does he become to her? (IMDb)Read More »

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A downbeat, hypnotic retelling of Mankind’s story from Adam and Eve to the present, played entirely by children. But don’t expect a romp — these kids are deadly serious as they tackle issues of mortality, religion, and the struggle of class against class. Brilliant photography enhances the deliberate pacing, yet the film is never boring. Literary sources include Emily Dickinson and William Blake, and every line is delivered with full conscious intention. Especially effective is the Byzantium sequence, where a single syllable (homousios, or homoiousios) means the difference between life and death. Seldom has the narcotic influence of religious power been so effectively portrayed. The use of a cast composed entirely of children is a conceit that lends itself to preciousness, but here it succeeds without the least trace of “cuteness”. In sum, a daring, challenging, and ultimately worthwhile experiment.Read More »

THE GOLDEN FERN (ZLATÉ KAPRADÍ) – 1963, NFA, 115 min. Czech director Jiří Weiss’s breathtaking B&W fairy tale is one of the most unjustly neglected treasures of 1960s fantasy filmmaking, a hauntingly lyrical work with overtones of Wojciech Has’s THE SARAGOSSA MANUSCRIPT, František Vláčil’s MARKETA LAZAROVÁ and Cocteau’s BEAUTY AND THE BEAST. A handsome young shepherd (Jean Marais lookalike Vít Olmer) stumbles across a magical golden fern in the forest. A stunning, enigmatic forest fairy named Lesanka (Karla Chadimová) is sent to retrieve it but instead falls hopelessly in love with him. When he’s forced to join the army and heads off to war, she sews a seed from the fern into his shirt to protect him.Read More »

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Toshiro Mifune swaggers and snarls to brilliant comic effect in Kurosawa’s tightly paced, beautifully composed “Sanjuro.” In this companion piece and sequel to “Yojimbo,” jaded samurai Sanjuro helps an idealistic group of young warriors weed out their clan’s evil influences, and in the process turns their image of a proper samurai on its ear.Read More »

Returning home and finding his town drastically changed, a former soldier falls in with gangsters.Read More »

Shown as part of Channel 4’s Video Fantasies series, a selection of four innovative dramas deploying state-of-the-art visual and electronic effects. This was the only one of the four that had a futuristic basis. It was set perhaps a couple of decades ahead in a world being slowly drowned by technology, a world in which traffic jams are the norm instead of the exception, and where the people avoid getting caught in the rain for better reasons than simply not wanting to get wet. The Rachel of the title is the younger sister of an up-and-coming marketing executive who has just secured a contract with a wealthy but repulsive millionaire who is into toxic waste, which he stores in secret for large sums of money.Read More »

Directed by a group of three young female directors named Irene von Alberti, Miriam Dehne and Esther Gronenborn. Each one of them has written and directed one of the episodes, which where composed to a continual narrative. Every episode is about one of the members of the Prater-ensemble (Prater is a small off-mainstream stage in Kastanienallee /Berlin Prenzlauer Berg, a part of the city well-known as a students district with lots of bars, night-clubs and fashion-stores, but also high unemployment). They are rehearsing René Polleschs “Stadt als Beute” / “city as a prey”, which was staged at Prater in 2001. Read More »