Comedy

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Based on a Pirandello play, Vittori De Sica plays a wealthy young social lion who has to constantly fight off a horde of women who are eager to marry him because of his position and money. He weds Elisa Cegani, a servant girl, who turns out to be a more appealing wife than any of the others could have been. Assis Noris decorates the screen well as one of the chasers and pursuers. In 1937, De Sica and Noris made a film, “II Signor Max,” which, other than the setting and character role names, basically has the same plot as this film.Read More »

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A prestigious Stockholm museum’s chief art curator finds himself in times of both professional and personal crisis as he attempts to set up a controversial new exhibit.Read More »

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René Clair’s exuberant anti-capitalist satire À nous la liberté was one of the early triumphs of sound cinema and is still considered one of the all-time greats of French cinema. The film is a light-hearted comic tour de force, erupting into unbridled farce in a few places, and yet it also offers an intelligent reflection on one of the major social preoccupations of the time: the gradual dehumanisation of mankind through technological progress. In characteristically humorous vein, Clair gives us a speculative glimpse of the future in which human beings are reduced to quasi-machines to meet the remorseless capitalist imperative for ever greater efficiency and increased output. The demoralising repetitiveness of life on the factory production line mirrors the endless monotony of the prison scenes at the start of the film, and both contain echoes of the Fascistic nightmare that would overrun most of Europe in the 1930s. In an era of immense social and technological change, Clair poses a timely question: what is man’s destiny, to be a free individualist or a robotic slave to corporate greed?Read More »

Why Can’t I Be Tarkovsky? (Neden Tarkovski Olamiyorum…) by Murat Düzgünoğlu (2014, 95 min.). Bahadır, an aspiring 35-year-old director, earns his living making cheap television films inspired by the stories behind Anatolian folk songs. His dream is to make films like his idol, Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, though it seems that everything stands between him and his ambition.

This low-key, tragicomic story presents us with a glimpse of the life of Bahadir, director of TV movies, who dreams of making artistically ambitious films like those of his idol, Andrei Tarkovsky.Read More »

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“To see Tokyo in all it’s wacky and scenic splendor, take a long walk with Tenten (a.k.a. Adrift in Tokyo). The latest from director Miki Satoshi (Insects Unlisted in the Encyclopedia ), Tenten is a brilliantly manic road comedy starring the unbeatable tag team of Odagiri Joe (Tokyo Tower – Mom & Me, and Sometimes Dad) and Miura Tomokazu (The Taste of Tea). Both actors are playing roles they could do in their sleep – prickly middle-ager and slacker student with unfortunate hair – and they bring the exact combination of calm calamity and charismatic craziness the film calls for. In the grand tradition of male bonding road movies, Tenten is just the aimless story of two strange guys walking around Tokyo for a few days and the stranger adventures they encounter – and yet, it’s so much more. Underachieving law student Takemura (Odagiri Joe) – on his eighth year and counting – has racked up quite a sizable debt in the name of higher education. The urgency of his financial situation announces itself in the form of hot-tempered debt collector Fukuhara (Miura Tomokazu), who comes bursting into his apartment one night demanding payment and threatening painful repercussions. Short of hitting it big on pachinko, Takemura has no idea how he can possibly pay back the sum. As the deadline closes in, Fukuhara makes Takemura an unexpected proposition: walk with him from Kichijoji (in western Tokyo) to Kasumigaseki (in central Tokyo), and he’ll pay the indebted student one million yen, enough to cover his debt. Bewildered but in no position to argue, Takemura hits the road with Fukuhara who, it turns out, just killed his wife and wants to turn himself in at a specific police station in Kasumigaseki. Getting there will take some time though, because many wacky people (including Koizumi Kyoko as a club madam) and surprise detours await them on the road in between.”Read More »

The Only Luxury: An Interview with Ted Fendt
By Dan Sullivan

For the past few years, Ted Fendt has been one of the busiest under-the-radar figures in film exhibition in New York: a projectionist at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, he is also the city’s go-to live-subtitler of rare, unsubtitled prints of French films, and ranks among its most active moviegoers. But his contributions to film culture extend beyond the local scene to the online sphere, where he has become an essential translator of texts by Jean-Luc Godard, Luc Moullet, Eric Rohmer, and Jean-André Fieschi, among others. He has also produced new English subtitles for a number of films by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet (having taught himself German in order to so) and co-edited the catalogue for an upcoming retrospective of their films to tour the US later in 2016.Read More »

Synopsis:
Vittorio De Sica, heir to a large sum of money and owner of a newspaper vending stall, makes enough money out of his business to take a vacation at a fashionable resort. He is given a cruise ticket by an aristocrat who is an old school friend, and is mistaken for the aristocrat when he uses a camera that has his friends name on it. Assia Noris plays a maid who falls in love with him because of who he is and not who others think he is.

Remade as Il Conte Max with Alberto Sordi in the De Sica role and the latter as the uncle.Read More »

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On an ordinary day in bustling downtown Madrid, life ticks over as usual, while inside a decrepit and noisy central bar, a motley assortment of common urbanites is killing time indolently, up until a loud gunshot sends chills down the spine. Out of the blue, now a man lies dead in front of the bar in a pool of blood, and then surprisingly, in broad daylight, another death follows. Where did that mysterious lethal bullet come from? Is this an act of terrorism or is there a solitary invisible sniper hidden on a roof? As hysteria prevails and the bodies miraculously vanish into thin air, the perplexed and terrified bar’s regulars are bound to turn on each other, paranoid and suspicious of the potential assassin who might be hiding inside the place. Is there indeed a wolf among sheep?Read More »

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With its giddily complex noir plot and color-drenched widescreen images, Made in U.S.A was a final burst of exuberance from Jean-Luc Godard’s early sixties barrage of delirious movie-movies. Yet this chaotic crime thriller and acidly funny critique of consumerism—starring Anna Karina as the most brightly dressed private investigator in film history, searching for a former lover who might have been assassinated—also points toward the more political cinema that would come to define Godard. Featuring characters with names such as Richard Nixon, Robert McNamara, David Goodis, and Doris Mizoguchi, and appearances by a slapstick Jean-Pierre Léaud and a sweetly singing Marianne Faithfull, this piece of pop art is like a Looney Tunes rendition of The Big Sleep gone New Wave.Read More »