Comedy

Synopsis:
An unconventional dentist (W. C. Fields) deals with patients in slapstick fashion.Read More »

Synopsis:
Fields relates the sad tale of his son who went astray in the city. Adapted from Fields’ 1928 Ear Carroll Vanities sketch “Stolen Bonds.”Read More »

Quote:
With this furiously witty comedy of manners, Katharine Hepburn revitalized her career and cemented her status as the era’s most iconic leading lady—thanks in great part to her own shrewd orchestrations. While starring in the Philip Barry stage play The Philadelphia Story, Hepburn acquired the screen rights, handpicking her friend George Cukor to direct. The intoxicating screenplay by Donald Ogden Stewart pits the formidable Philadelphia socialite Tracy Lord (Hepburn, at her most luminous) against various romantic foils, chief among them her charismatic ex-husband (Cary Grant), who disrupts her imminent marriage by paying her family estate a visit, accompanied by a tabloid reporter on assignment to cover the wedding of the year (James Stewart, in his only Academy Award–winning performance). A fast-talking screwball comedy as well as a tale of regret and reconciliation, this convergence of golden-age talent is one of the greatest American films of all time.Read More »

Quote:
Two years before stars Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant and director George Cukor would collaborate on The Philadelphia Story, they brought their timeless talents to this delectable slice of 1930s romantic-comedy perfection, the second film adaptation of a hit 1928 play by Philip Barry. Grant is at his charismatic best as the acrobatically inclined free spirit who, following a whirlwind engagement, literally tumbles into the lives of his fiancée’s aristocratic family—setting up a clash of values with her staid father while firing the rebellious imagination of her brash, black-sheep sister (Hepburn). With a sparkling surface and an undercurrent of melancholy, Holiday is an enchanting ode to nonconformists and pie-in-the-sky dreamers everywhere, as well as a thoughtful reflection on what it truly means to live well.Read More »

Quote:
Erica is unmarried only temporarily in that her successful, wealthy husband of seventeen years has just left her for a girl he met while buying a shirt in Bloomingdale’s. The film shows Erica coming to terms with the break-up while revising her opinions of herself, redefining that self in its own right rather than as an extension of somebody else’s personality, and finally going out with another man. Erica refuses to drop everything for Saul, an abstract expressionist painter, simply out of love for him because he expects her to. It is not so much loneliness that is her problem, and the problems that men, flitting around this newly “available” woman like moths round a flame, bring to her sense of independence.Read More »

Quote:
The first sound film version in Spanish of the great classic novel by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. A huge undertaking for Spanish cinema in its day, it was the longest film version of the novel up to that time, and very likely the most faithful, reverently following the book in its dialogue and order of episodes.Read More »

In the movie La valigia dei sogni (The Suitcase of Dreams, Italy, 1953) directed by Luigi Comencini, some sequences from Cenere are inserted. The protagonist is a former silent film actor who has saved old movies of his time from destruction, and uses them to set up recreational performances at schools. After an accidental fire and the risk of prison, he meets a rich producer who helps him to build a film museum.Read More »

Everybody who went to college and had good friends there, or spent lots of careless time with wild and young companions, will be deeply affected by this film. Dagen Zonder Lief shows us in a glowing, slow burning way what we all know: nothing lasts forever, not even friendship. The wonderful characters in Dagen Zonder Lief were young together and had loads of fun, as the subtle flashbacks show us, but those days are over. One is married and has a little baby; another one left for New York; yet another one is about to enter the snobbish world of his snobbish girlfriend. There’s still a spark when they meet, but that’s it: just a spark. Not the burning fire of the old days. The suicide of one or their common friends and the inexplicable need to settle prevents them from truly reliving the old days. They hardly ever mention it, but you can see it in their every movement and expression.Read More »

IMDb wrote:
Over at the fictional DRGBP institution, events take a settling turn after a mutinied prize festivity.

Lucian Lupescu review wrote:
In this comedy, the manager (Alexandru Giugaru) of an institution is challenged, during a meeting where he hands out bonuses to everyone, by a worker who says he doesn’t deserve that bonus. Encouraged by another worker, Maria Popescu (Angela Chiuaru), he manages to convince everyone to give the money back. Everyone except for the lazy clerk Ciubuc (Grigore Vasiliu-Birlic), who sneaks out quickly with his bonus. Read More »