Synopsis:
Sofia, (Rosa Maria Sarda from All About My Mother), a renowned pianist, is long separated from the daughters’ father. It is on the occasion of her birthday that she delivers a stunning announcement: she has fallen in love again.
Clearly smitten, she begins to describe her new lover: somewhat younger…also a pianist. The daughters, thrilled and eager to hear more, are interrupted by the doorbell. A woman walks in.Read More »
The owner of a bookshop in Paris suffers a personal crisis. In order to solve it he decides to convert his library into a sex-shop but the only effect is that he turns himself into a sexual obsessive man.Read More »
Introduction
A dark satire of a contemporary Japan still exhausted from the aftermath of war, hunger, poverty and unemployment.And just as its people are recovering, there is a threat during these Cold War years of renewed militarism and rearm…Read More »
Eccentric film about female reporter fired for writing about police corruption. To make money she hides while a weekly magazine offers a prize for her discovery. A bank embezzler and his underlings take advantage of her disappearance to pin the theft on her, as well as the murder of the weak link in their gang. Meanwhile, the cop she got fired is now a private detective and he gets involved in the investigation. Another example of Ichikawa’s mixing of farcical genre filmmaking with perspicacious visual design. Comic highlights include an intentions of murder scene in which each shot reveals the gap in knowledge between potential perpetrator and victim, and the role of unseen objects in accidentally protecting the latter from the former. Another cynical film that finds in cinema a model for the superficial image society of 1950s Japan.Read More »
The thirteen survivors of a catastrophe by a tunnel’s collapse tries to balance their experience trapped along 15 days inside it with their day-by-day outside it.Read More »
Before Yoji Yamada started work on the gargantuan Tora-san (男はつらいよ) franchise, he did a couple of comedies with a comedian called Hajime Hana. Most notably are the “Baka” and “Ippatsu” trilogies. “Vagabond Schemer” is the third entry of the latter, which was the last movie Yamada did before the very first Tora-san in the same year. It’s also the third Yamada movie I’ve worked on, and I think it’s my favorite. Where “The Lovable Tramp” was essentially a proto Tora-san, this couldn’t be more removed from that concept. It’s a very black comedy about a boorish man (Hana) who comes back from Borneo one day to find his best friend’s been hurriedly cremated by his fellow tenement dwellers, so he basically starts pestering them and maybe taking things a bit too far in the end. Chieko Baisho who would play Tora-san’s sister Sakura continues to be Yamada’s muse of choice, but she’s not quite as typecast yet in these earlier movies of his, so that’s always nice to see.Read More »
Synopsis:
In order to convince Raimonda, a wealthy noble woman, to finance his project for a holiday resort, Saverio gets engaged to Clotilde, her mentally-disturbed and sex-obsessed adolescent daughter. He plans to have her kidnapped and raped by an accomplice so she won’t be a virgin anymore and he’ll have an excuse to get out of the impending marriage. But what he doesn’t plan is to fall in love with the girl…
“All the films I’ve made are denunciations of taboos, errors, crystallisations, impositions, injustices.” Alberto LatuadaRead More »
Quote:
The authors decidedly refute the myth of the woman – guardian of the hearth. Their heroine is a modern and an energetic girl who demands her partners to be successful in every field. A beginning writer and translator, running from his wife and mother-in-law, falls into her trap. What happens to a sensitive man in an encounter with overwhelming female force?Read More »
Synopsis
Soon after the Great War, the Provence village of Salezes gets a new boys’ teacher: Mr. Pascal, a war hero with a diploma from a teachers’ college. He rejects old methods: boys’ sitting still with arms folded memorizing facts. He uses modern methods: he becomes their guide…Read More »