Crime

From frenchfilms.org

Georges Simenon’s 1940 novel Les Inconnus dans la maison is a brooding study in social breakdown and youth disaffection that contains a powerful critique of western society of the 1940s. The same can equally be said of Henri Decoin’s magnificent film adaptation, one of the earliest and most successful attempts to bring Simenon’s bleak, melancholic world to the big screen. This was the second film that Decoin made for the German-run film company Continental-Films during the Nazi Occupation of France and it could hardly be more different in tone and subject from his first, the American-style romantic comedy Premier rendez-vous (1941).Read More »

Synopsis:
After escaping from a courtroom during his trial, a criminal plans the biggest bank robbery every to have taken place in Germany.Read More »

Synopsis:
When the accident-prone daughter of a French businessman disappears in Mexico and the detective sent down to find her returns empty-handed, the businessman’s company psychologist comes up with an unusual plan – send someone equally accident-prone to find her. Despite detective Campana’s objections and disbelief in bad luck, he and Francois Perrin, the accident-prone man in question, are teamed up and head back down to Mexico to pick up the girl’s trail.Read More »

Synopsis:
No one would think that Manuel Ismora, an esteemed society photographer, is an audacious thief and con artist. The newspapers are ?lled with accounts of Ismora’s criminal exploits, which involve the fraudulent sale of a château and the theft of some valuable jewels, but the police are slow in bringing him to justice. Instead, it is Gabriel Dupon, a modest button salesman who bears a remarkable physical resemblance to Imora, who ends up being taken into custody. Positively identi?ed by Imora’s many victims, Dupon is branded a criminal, and even when he is released by the police through lack of evidence, his reputation is in tatters.Read More »

Synopsis:
A group of new police recruits takes to patrolling the streets of Los Angeles. Roy Fehler is a law student with a family and has joined the LAPD until he can complete his degree. He’s partnered with veteran patrolman Kilvinski and they soon develop a good rapport. On the street the policemen are exposed to the seedier side of life but Kilvinski is a fair cop and a good teacher. Over time however, Fehler comes to love the work and both his family and his studies fall by the wayside. Kilvinsky retires and Fehler loses his way, drinking heavily. Fehler’s wife leaves him and he soon hits bottom. Just as he begins to get his life in order, fate intervenes.Read More »

Quote:
Poitin is widely regarded as a classic of Irish cinema. It tells the story of a Conamara moonshiner, his daughter and two cheating agents who they outwit and bring to a tragic end. The story has a de Maupassant atmosphere, interspersed with comic moments. This is the digitally remastered version (2007) with new score by Bill Whelan.Read More »

Synopsis:
Scotland Yard’s Jim Naboth (Stacy Keach) battled the bottle instead of London’s seedy underworld and lost. But he finds one chance to get out of life’s gutter when the mob kidnaps his ex-wife in a ruthless $1-million ransom scheme. Director Michael Apted tightens The Squeeze into a penetrating study of people under stress – and a walloping bloody, sexy detective caper in the mold of great British gangland thrillers like Get Carter and The Long Good Friday. Read More »

Synopsis / Review from CINEUROPA:

With only four feature films to her name over the past 30 years and a propensity to always go where you don’t expect, from the rural drama of Peaux de vaches (discovered in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes in 1989) to high-level horse riding in Of Women and Horses [+] (screened on the Piazza Grande at Locarno in 2011) and Mme de Maintenon’s ruthless gynaecium at the end of the seventeenth century in The King’s Daughters (also screened in the Un Certain Regard section in 2000 and nominated for a César Award for Best Film). Read More »

Synopsis:
Lynn Hart is a disturbed young woman who escapes from a mental hospital where she was committed for killing her abusive father who raped her. Stealing a nurse’s uniform and car, Lynn ends up in a small California town where she meets and shacks up with Zambrini, an old farmer who runs the local motel and roadside café. Zambrini also owns a group of pigs that he keeps in a pen behind his house who have somehow developed a taste for human flesh. When Lynn begins killing a number of men who remind her of her dead father, Zambrini helps her out by disposing of the bodies to the pigs. Investigating the disappearances, the local sheriff eventually becomes suspicious of Lynn’s past and a private investigator, hired by the hospital to find her, slowly close in on Lynn.Read More »