Comedy

Alice is a successful barrister who lives with her stay-at-home boyfriend Nicholas. When their mutual friend Juliette splits up with her partner Michel, Nicholas takes solace in the fact that his relationship with Alice is a stable one. He does not realise that Alice has been seeing another man, a handsome sports photographer, Gaspard, for the past few months. When he discovers the truth, Nicholas goes to extreme lengths to gain Gaspard’s confidence, with the intention of sabotaging the affair…Read More »

Quote:
A newspaper obit writer, impatient to move ahead at his job, wishes he could know the news before it happens. One night, Old Pop Benson grants him that power, in the form of the next day’s newspaper. At first it only gets him in trouble, but also brings him closer to the pretty girl in a fortune-telling routine. By the third tomorrow’s paper, he’s sure he’s got this whole future business in the bag — reporting advance scoops, picking sure winners at the race track — when he reads a very final headline: the news of his own death.Read More »

Synopsis:
John Steinbeck introduces five of O. Henry’s most popular short stores in this anthology film. In “The Cop and the Anthem” a homeless alcoholic is increasingly frustrated in numerous attempts to get arrested and jailed for 90 days in a warm cell rather than face the rigors of a New York winter. In “The Clarion Call” a NYPD detective has a crisis of conscience when he is torn between his duty to arrest a childhood friend for a murder only he knows he committed and the debt of honor he still owes to him. In “The Last Leaf” a naive young girl is stricken with pneumonia after being seduced and jilted by venal actor. Read More »

This 1981 nihilist epic by Shohei Imamura is witty, grotesque, relentless, and beautifully engineered. The setting is the Edo era, when local warlords battle the emperor for control of the country, and all of Japan is under cultural pressure from its long delayed opening to the West. Political loyalties and personal loves disintegrate; the only certainty is money, and even that is crumbling. Imamura follows eight major characters through a bright, bursting, impossibly dynamic mise-en-scene, leading up to the Eijanaika (“What the hell?”) riots—a frightening, exhilarating explosion of empty freedom, the freedom of those who have lost everything. A very important film, and possibly a great one.Read More »

Ambrose Wolfinger wants the afternoon off (his first in twenty-five years) to go to a wrestling match. He tells his boss that he must attend his mother-in-law’s funeral. The afternoon is no joy. He tries to please a policeman, assist a chauffeur, chase a tire, and ends up getting hit by the body of a wrestler thrown from the ring. A series of mishaps leads his boss to send floral tributes to the house and notify the papers of the death (due to poisoned liquor). His shrewish wife, judgmental mother-in-law, and good-for-nothing brother-in-law add to his burdens. In the end he enjoys their fawning loyalty, a raise in pay, and his first vacation.Read More »

Jose is a thief and, to escape the guards chasing him, hides in a barrel. But it so happens that this barrel will be placed on board a pirate ship, commanded by the notorious Black Pirate.
José is discovered and accepted among the pirates, and even appointed officer after the fight with a Spanish vessel. But when the pirates attack the castle of the Spanish governor, Jose helps Isabella, the daughter of the governor, and thus defies the Black Pirate. Things seem to go wrong.Read More »

Brief synopsis
Mayor Peppone might very well lose the elections and Don Camillo makes sure that the mayor’s delinquent son gets his act together while his own niece makes Peppone think she is pregnant by his son.Read More »

Review by Jonathan Rosenbaum:
It’s been a full quarter of a century, but I still harbor fond memories of a low-budget French comedy called Valparaiso Valparaiso, a first feature starring Alain Cuny and Bernadette Lafont that I saw at Cannes in 1973. A lighthearted satire about the myopia of romantic French revolutionaries, it details an elaborate hoax perpetrated on a befuddled leftist–a character so absorbed in the glory of departing for Chile to fight the good fight as a special agent that he doesn’t even notice the political struggle going on around him on the French docks when he leaves. Read More »

Plot:
Joel Sloane is a rare book dealer and part time detective. He finds stolen or lost rare books for the insurance companies and gets a reward for their return. But this is a little different. Otto Brockler, a rare book dealer with questionable ethics, has been murdered. The list of suspects is long.Read More »