Classics

I looked out for this movie way back then because it starred Bradford Dillman who had made such a big impression as the charismatically cheerful but murderous Artie Strauss in “Compulsion”.”Circle of Deception” proved something of a letdown because Dillman, as a man taken to drink through self-hatred was hardly sympathetic and his costar, the ex-model Suzy Parker was no less unemotive than she had been before. As it happened I think this was Dillmans last gasp at starring roles, but he became an extremely busy TV and film supporting player for many years thereafter. The film itself predated the downbeat spy genre in which our spymasters were portrayed for once as being as devious and viscious as their spymasters, but it was barely noticed, and it was later that “the Ipcress File” got the genre going. What “Circle of Deception” did have going for it for me was the shock revelation that, well, Dillman had been disgracefully set up. I remember it for that,if nothing else.
By: IMDB user.Read More »

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It is the early 60s in France. The remaining survivors of the aborted French Foreign Legion have made repeated attempts to kill DeGaulle. The result is that he is the most closely guarded man in the world. As a desperate act, they hire The Jackal, the code name for a hired killer who agrees to kill French President De Gaulle for half a million dollars. We watch his preparations which are so thorough we wonder how he could possibly fail even as we watch the French police attempt to pick up his trail. The situation is historically accurate. There were many such attempts and the film closely follows the plot of the book.Read More »

1776. Along with Lithuania and Prussia, Poland has succumbed to the might of the Russian Empire, but a determined resistance movement is working to bring an end to the country’s annexation. A young woman named Sonia is the figurehead of the Polish resistance fighters, but the Empress Catherine II has no fear of her, as she knows that Sonia is of Russian blood – a fact that she asks the Baron de Kempelen to make known to her political enemies. But Kempelen’s allegiances are ambiguous and he appears more preoccupied with the elaborate life-size automata he is working on than the political situation.Read More »

Shannon Kelley writes:
The powers and fascinations of director John Ford and playwright Eugene O’Neill are happily met in this 1940 feature dramatizing the lives of men who serve as crew members aboard commercial freighters. Like O’Neill, Ford nursed a lifelong obsession with sailing and the sea, and had spent his early years in Portland, Maine, amid the maritime culture that this picture describes. Adapted and updated by screenwriter Dudley Nichols (Ford’s frequent collaborator) from four of O’Neill’s early plays set aboard the fictional “SS Glencairn,” the film recounts the experiences of the ship’s crew while transporting ammunition from the West Indies to England during World War II. Read More »

Mr. Pezzella (Toto) owns and operates a luxury clothing store very well established. By its nature, but does not like and does not consider it right to pay taxes and therefore uses a tax consultant (Louis de Funès) to be able to evade more calmly. Unfortunately for the cavalier Pezzella the Guardia di Finanza decides to send an inspection, in the person of Marshal Topponi (Aldo Fabrizi) and Brigadier Bardi. They start attempts Pezzella (guided by the advice of dishonest and ineffective tax advisor) to get into dell’inossidabile marshal to try to bribe him, and sometimes openly declaring with excessive dose of servility.Read More »

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From the author of The Citadel and in the grand epic tradition of MGM’s adaptations, The Green Years is the moving story of a boy’s difficult growth to manhood. When young Robert Shannon is orphaned, he leaves his home in Ireland and travels to Scotland, home of his maternal grandparents. Growing up in the home of his stern grandfather (Charles Coburn, in an Academy Award®-nominated performance*) is made bearable by his great-grandfather, loving grandmother and kind aunt and uncle. After a rocky adjustment to his new school, Robbie is befriended by Gavin and Allison, whom he grows to love.Read More »

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Lorenzo, a student at Salamanca in the late 1950s, has just spent a summer in England where he has discovered new ways of life and other horizons as well as meeting and falling in love Berta, the daughter of an exile who has never seen Spain. Upon his return, the traditional atmosphere of his family, routine relations with his friends and his girlfriend, and the tedium of life in the city become more and more overwhelming. He writes to his idealized Berta, still living in England, in a series of letters to try to convey to her what life is like in Spain and his desire to leave his provincial family behind and discover life on his own. Although the lure to break free is foremost on his mind, he decides to marry a young woman from a similar background to live the life of a country squire. However, a trip to Madrid opens up other possibilities.Read More »

Two kids take a book from a trash can. They begin to read the story of a poor neighborhood in Mexico City. Carpenter Pepe “El Toro” (Infante) lives with his daughter Chachita (Munoz) and woos pretty “Chorreada” (Pavon). Around them, a group of fellows live their lives in many ways: a pair of always-drunk women known as “La Tostada” (The Toast) and “La Guayaba” (The Guava); a beautiful woman (Jurado) who always oversleeps; a hooker with pneumonia (La Tisica) with a dark past. Tragedy comes when Pepe is falsely accused of robbery and sent to the jail.Read More »

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The Shiranui Sea is the second of the Minamata documentaries released by Zakka Films and widely considered to be Tsuchimoto’s masterpiece. If Minimata: The Victims and Their World follows the victims in their struggle for compensation for suffering from Minimata Disease, Japan’s most notorious case of environmental pollution, The Shiranui Sea provides a beautifully lyrical and compelling portrait of their everyday lives and difficulties. It is both a profound expose of how government and industry can undermine the environmental foundations of daily life, and a model for how documentary can humanely reveal human suffering.

“One of the monuments of Japanese documentary”.Read More »