Crime

Plot Synopsis by Hal Erickson
Mickey Rooney made his directorial debut with My True Story. Per its title, the film is based on an article which first appeared in the pages of True Story magazine. Jewel thief Ann Martin (Helen Walker) is paroled thanks to some string-pulling by criminal boss George Trent (Wilton Graff). Ann soon learns that she is expected to participate in a major gem heist. With the help of policeman Bill Phillips (Willard Parker) — who also happens to be a former member of U.S. military intelligence — Ann hopes to turn the tables on the smooth-but-deadly Trent. Featured in the cast as “Mark Foster” is Aldo DaRe, who would matriculate to stardom under the nom de film of Aldo Ray.Read More »

Paul, the owner of a topless go-go bar on the Sunset Strip, isn’t having a good day. His girlfriend, unbeknownst to him, is planning to rob his club, and his wife is having an affair with the hunky bartender.Read More »

A murder opens up a bleak trail of long buried secrets and small town corruption for a worn out police detective and his squad.Read More »

PLOT: A young piano tuner befriends two rich old-ladies, and plots, with the help of his girlfriend, to betray their trust and steal from them.Read More »

Mariani, a Corsican gangster, sympathizes with his cellmate, Léo, a police inspector who poses as an inmate. When Léo is to be released, Mariani hand him a letter to bring to his wife Elaine.Read More »

Cambrai, a modest captain in the French secret service, discovers that his superior, Colonel Toulouse, was responsible for the death of his rival Milan. To cover his tracks, Toulouse immediately sends two hit-men to Rio de Janeiro to eliminate François Perrin, the innocent “grand blond” who was instrumental in Toulouse’s scheme to remove Milan. When Perrin miraculously survives, Toulouse changes his strategy. He takes Perrin into his confidence and attempts to convert him into an ace secret agent, thereby discrediting Cambrai and proving that he is innocent of Milan’s death. When his beloved Christine is abducted by Toulouse’s agents, Perrin has no other choice. Indeed, he seems to relish the prospect of becoming a real-life James Bond…Read More »

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In “La perdición de los hombres”, Ripstein once again enters the world of misery, though his characters are not precisely outcasts as the fat nurse and her gigolo lover. This time he returns to his early free-style -it’s even in black and white-, as he tells the stories of normal people, who choose weird solutions to their predicaments and whose dreams occupy the same space and tone as their daily actions on the screen. Garciadiego rarely paints a “nice” male character. So here there are not only one but three machos, who play baseball and believe that man’s downfall is personified in women (in fact, the movie’s title is a verse from a popular ranchera that goes “Man’s downfall / Is the damned woman”). Garciadiego built her story a la “Pulp Fiction”, with the first act told after the resolution, so one has to wait quite a bit to know why two of the guys kill their pal, known as the “King of the Baseball Diamond”, while his widow fights for his corpse with his younger and prettier lover.Read More »

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Small-time crook Nick Bianco gets caught in a jewel heist and despite urgings from well-meaning district attorney D’Angelo, refuses to rat on his partners and goes to jail, assured that his wife and children will be taken care of. Learning that his depressed wife has killed herself, Nick informs on his ex-pals and is paroled. Nick remarries, gets a job and begins leading a happy life when he learns one of the men he informed on, psychopathic killer Tommy Udo, has been released from custody and is out for revenge against Nick and his family.Read More »

Five men share a secret that has deadly consequences in this thriller from Belgium. When Filip (Matthias Schoenaerts), a playboy with a wild streak, finally settles down and gets married, his good friend Vincent (Filip Peeters) presents him and three of his friends with a special gift. Vincent is an architect, and after supervising the renovation of a apartment block, he installed a luxurious penthouse flat for the use of himself and his married pals, where they can enjoy liaisons with other women without their spouses becoming any the wiser. Filip, Vincent and three of their buddies — hard-drinking ladies’ man Marnix (Koen de Graeve), Filip’s psychoanalyst brother Chris (Koen De Bauw) and taciturn Luc (Bruno Vanden Broecke) — are the only ones with keys to the flat, and the only ones who are supposed to know it exists. But one day one of the five checks into the apartment and discovers a woman’s bloody corpse shackled to the bed; one of their group is a murderer, but who is the killer and how can the others keep this a secret from the police and their families? Loft was directed by Erik Van Looy and written by Bart de Pauw, both of whom got their start in the film business as actors.Read More »