Crime

This tale of a crook’s reform takes place in the San Francisco of the early 1900s. Predictably, Lon Chaney plays a crook and a misshapen cripple (the type of role almost expected of him at this point in his career). Anne Vincent, better known as “Queen Anne” (Christine Mayo), sends Wilse Dilling (Chaney) to a small town to keep an eye on Mischa Hadley (William Welsh), an embezzling banker who is her lover. Dilling falls in love with Hadley’s daughter, Gertrude (Virginia Valli), and blows up the bank’s safe to destroy incriminating records. The blast, however, leaves Gertrude a cripple, and Dilling uses his savings to restore her to health. Queen Anne, whose greed knows no end, has told Hadley that he will either give her more money or give her his daughter. Ultimately, she has Gertrude kidnapped and taken to a Chinese den. Dilling rescues her and she helps in his regeneration. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake shakes everything up, and Dilling’s reform is complete.~Janiss Garza @allmovie.comRead More »

Plot

When a high-ranking Soviet intelligence officer defects to the West with a story of an agreement between the Russians and Cubans and the existence of a “mole” within the French intelligence service, CIA agent Nordstrom (John Forsythe) enlists the aid of his friend and French agent André Devereaux (Frederick Stafford), encouraging him to accompany his daughter Michèle (Claude Jade) on her honeymoon with journalist François Picard (Michel Subor) as a premise to get him to New York. André accepts, but his wife Nicole (Dany Robin) is worried for him.

After managing to get hold of some seriously damaging papers from the visiting Cuban official Rico Parra (John Vernon), in New York to appear at the United Nations and staying in Harlem to show solidarity with “the masses”, sneakily of course, a concerned Devereaux jets off to Cuba and catches up with his mistress Juanita de Cordoba (Karin Dor), who is now secretly involved with a local underground movement whilst also being involved in another way with Parra. Parra finds out and kills Juanita in a highly stylized memorable scene. Devereaux then is recalled to Paris, where he attempts to get to the bottom of this whole leak problem. Michèle wants to reconcile her parents.Read More »

Annika Bengtzon is working as a summer intern at the newspaper Kvällspressen. Assigned to screening crank phone calls on the tip line in hopes of getting an occasional valid news break, Annika receives an anonymous tip about the nude corpse of a young girl in a public park. The girl has been raped and killed. Annika provides a strong story that earns her accolades from her boss.As the plot develops, the focus of the investigation shifts from the victim’s lover, the owner of the upscale sex club where she worked, to an important government minister who keeps a secret apartment near the park. Delving into the bureaucrat’s alibi, Annika discovers that he is somehow involved in the cover up of the reappearance of a missing archive that could shake the foundation of the ruling Social Democrats, concerning an illegal espionage operation long since disbanded.Read More »

Twenty-eight-year-old Tom leads a life that might be termed as criminal. In doing so, he follows in the footsteps of his father, who made his money from dirty, and sometimes brutal, real estate deals. Tom is a pretty hard-boiled guy but also strangely considerate as far as his father is concerned. Somehow he appears to have arrived at a critical juncture in his life when a chance encounter prompts him to take up the piano and become a concert pianist, like his mother. He senses that this might be his final opportunity to take back his life. His piano teacher is a Chinese piano virtuoso who has recently come to live in France. She doesn’t speak a lick of French so music becomes the only language they have in common. Before long, Jacques’ bid to be a better person means that he begins to yearn for true love. But, when he finally has the chance of winning his best friend’s wife, his passion only succeeds in scaring her. And then, one day, his dubious past comes to light…Read More »

Linda Loves her work, and her work is LOVE…

Linda comes to the big city in search of fun and excitement. What she finds is exploitation and abuse at the hands of a succession of sleazy guys. Searching for love, she enters into a lesbian relationship with a beautiful countess, discovers drugs and swingers’ parties and starts acting in porno movies. She also begins to write a secret diary… With a cast of some of the most stunning Euro actresses of the period, wall-to-wall sex and nudity, pot parties, porno shoots and a psychedelic soundtrack, this is a gem of 1970s exploitation cinema from Jess Franco. Street scenes shot in Benidorm (Alicante, Spain) and Las Palmas (Gran Canaria, Spain).Read More »

Description: While it rolled in and out of theaters quickly during its brief release in 1978 and hasn’t gained much of a reputation since, Straight Time was one of Dustin Hoffman’s best films of the 1970s, and seen today it still stacks up as one of the finest performances he’s ever given onscreen. Hoffman is a fascinating bundle of misdirected energy and guy-wire tension as Max Dembo, an ex-con whose efforts to go straight seem doomed to fail, though his own impulses hardly keep him on the straight and narrow. Hoffman is perfectly natural and compelling as a blue-collar criminal, and he’s lucky to have a superb supporting cast. M. Emmet Walsh has never been better as Earl Frank, a duplicitous parole officer, and Theresa Russell delivers an absorbing and ultimately heart-breaking turn as Jenny, a girl who falls in love with Dembo; Gary Busey, Harry Dean Stanton, and Sandy Baron are similarly at the top of their form here. Ulu Grosbard’s direction (he took over from Hoffman, who began the project but changed his mind about directing after a few days of shooting) is lean, intelligent, and atmospheric, and the screenplay (by Jeffrey Boam and Edward Bunker, based on Bunker’s novel No Beast So Fierce) manages to make Dembo’s story tragic and believable without ever asking the audience to forgive or forget his complicity in his crimes. Straight Time is an overlooked and understated masterwork, and well worth searching out on home video.Read More »

Quote:
Roy Andersson premiered his second feature-length film, “Giliap”, in 1975. The film is a marked departure from “A Swedish Love Story”, and that is no accident. Success brought pressure onto Andersson to make “A Swedish Love Story II”. But he didn’t want to be someone who churned out yet another film in the same spirit, and then one more… So he changed style drastically in “Giliap”. Andersson had great hopes for the film, but it found neither a public nor positive reviews. “Giliap” did, however, win a larger reception abroad, especially in France. Yet despite its meagre successes in Sweden, the film is interesting, not least aesthetically. For here one finds the first seeds of Andersson’s distinctive film style.
In “Giliap”, actor Thommy Berggren plays a wandering day-labourer who takes employment at the fading Hotel Busarewski. The hotel is run by a wheelchair-bound misanthrope who harshly deals out orders to his staff as he reminisces about Busarewski’s former golden days.Read More »

A New York City narcotics detective reluctantly agrees to cooperate with a special commission investigating police corruption, and soon realises he’s in over his head, and nobody can be trusted.Read More »

from rottentomatoes:
Born with a horribly disfigured face, and unable to become part of “normal”society, John Sedley turns to a life of crime. But his two fellow gang members trick him and Johnny is sent to prison. There he meets a plastic surgeon who takes sympathy on him and surgically transforms him into a new man. Now unrecognizable to those who once knew him, the once ugly duckling plots a vicious revenge.Read More »