Arthouse

The daily life of young people at the dawn of the 1980s. One of them murdered passers-by in a park, shooting at random with a gun. One day, she meets a burglar who poisons her victims and confides in him.Read More »

“A magical journey to the end of the earth…”

Synopsis:
The Patagonian steppe is swept by a grey wind… Mora, 13 years old, wants to be a “gaucho”. She rebels against school and affirms herself to her parents, Swiss Italian ecologists, whose dream of autonomy turns into a nightmare. Mora will go deep into the meanders of the steppe to help her only friend Nazareno, an old Mapuche who has lost his horse, Zahorí.Read More »

Hynek Bočan was a member of the Czech New Wave who drew his inspiration from literary works and displayed an exceptional sense of social irony and sarcasm in the films Nobody Will Laugh (Nikdo se nebude smát, 1965), Private Storm (Soukromá vichřice, 1967) and Honor and Glory (Čest a sláva, 1968). Deadpan humor, a sense of atmosphere, and an intellectual approach to the subject matter were characteristic of Bočan’s talent.Read More »

Doppelgänger, Kurosawa Kiyoshi

Michio Hayasaki, a brilliant developer of medical instruments, is working on a robot chair, equipped with artificial limbs, for people who are completely paralysed. He feels he is being pressed by his employer Medical Cytech to come up with a successful design at short notice and he is in danger of burning out. Then, one evening, he thinks he sees his double. Hayasaki has the shock of his life: superstition suggests that meeting your double means you will soon die. But, after a confrontation with his maladjusted doppelgänger, it becomes clear that Hayasaki could take advantage of his violent tricks. The double reduces Hayasaki’s lab to rubble, clears another double out of the way, hires an assistant for Hayasaki and comes up with a new lab. But in the end, one of them will have to perish…Read More »

Quote:
Fishmonger Polina drinks some tea given to her by a strange old woman that transforms her sleep into a fairy tale where she thinks she’s the tsar’s daughter.Read More »

Set against the backdrop of World War II, Blood Feud tells of the struggle against the Sicilian Mafia, from the streets of Sicily to the tenements of New York. Titina (Sophia Loren) is a happily married Sicilian housewife but, like so many others, is widowed early in life when her husband is brutally murdered by the Mafia. After spending ten years away, Spallone (Marcello Mastroianni), returns home and falls in love with Titina. Also returning to avenge his cousin’s death is Nick (Giancarlo Giannini), a small-time crook, who also falls for his cousin’s widow. In the deadly game of love as in war there is always a winner and a loser…Read More »

Synopsis:
This is the story of women at three stages of life in Iran. The first part centers on a young girl on her ninth birthday who is told that she can no longer play with the boys she had been playing with only the day before because she is now a “woman”. Told from the perspective of a nine year old “woman” who does not feel like or know what that label refers to, we see how devastatingly this affects both the girl and the boy with whom she had been friends. The second part is about a young woman who decides to enter a bicycle race against her husband’s wishes. As first the husband and then increasing numbers of men from the village ride beside her to convince her to return home, the race begins to symbolize a freedom she desperately wants from the limitations which have been placed on her. Finally, the third part shows us an old woman who has come into some money and is now free to do what she wants. The way she chooses to use this freedom, however, makes one wonder just how free she is.Read More »

When “Snam” gets ambushed by a group of thieves, he finds himself lost in the Saudi desert. While his pregnant wife, Halla, faces the men of the tribe to ensure his return, he finds himself being followed by a lone wolf.Read More »

Quote:
Yuri Illyenko, the master Ukrainian cinematographer who shot Sergei Paradjanov’s Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors (1965) and directed the long-banned A Spring for the Thirsty (1965) and The Eve of Ivan Kupalo (1968), based this striking 1990 allegorical film on stories by Paradjanov that were inspired by his long sojourns in prison. The film was shot at the prison where Paradjanov was confined, using contemporary prisoners as extras, and it might be said that the documentary and poetic-symbolic aspects of this movie are equally germane to its overall impact. Three days before his sentence is to end, a prisoner (Victor Solovyov) escapes and hides out inside a giant hammer and sickle that borders the prison grounds, where he is discovered and nursed back to health by a beautiful woman (Liudmyla Yefymenko, Illyenko’s wife) who becomes his lover. One of the first independent Soviet productions, partially financed in Sweden and Canada, the film tells its story with a minimum of dialogue and very striking imagery. – Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago ReaderRead More »