Drama

A young woman, Poppy, out for excitement in Shanghai, enters a gambling house owned by “Mother” Gin Sling, a dragon-lady who worked herself up from poverty to buy the casino. Sir Guy Charteris, wealthy entrepreneur, has purchased a large area of Shanghai, forcing Gin Sling to vacate by the coming Chinese New Year. Under orders from Gin Sling, who has found out Poppy is Charteris’ daughter, the smarmy Doctor Omar leads Poppy deeper and deeper into an addiction to gambling and alcohol. Gin Sling, realizing that Charteris was her long-ago husband who she thinks abandoned her, plans her revenge by inviting Charteris to a Chinese New Year dinner party to expose his past indiscretions. Charteris, however, has a suprise of his own to spring on Gin Sling.Read More »

I’m the marquis de Lafayette !
..or La Fayette ,the French spelling.The first thing to bear in mind is that ,at the time,it was the biggest budget France had ever spent for a movie:hence the cast which includes Orson Welles as Franklin -a part he had already played in Sacha Guitry’s “si Versailles m’était conté”-,Vittorio DeSica ,Jack Hawkins ,Edmund Purdom ,Liselotte Pulver;on the other hand,the French stars are not big names: Pascale Audret and Michel LeRoyer were far from being very famous compared with Bardot,Delon,Belmondo,Ventura or Moreau.Other assets were Claude Renoir’s peerless cinematography and a lilting tuneful score .Read More »

Plot:
Shortly before the end of the Civil War, in 1948, the villages along the border are evacuated to facilitate the National Army’s movements as well as to hamper those of the rebels. A forty-year-old villager, Margaritis (Thymios Karakatsanis), is forced, as are many others, to abandon his home and head for Thessaloniki with his two children. He settles into one of the city buildings, the Caravanserai, which has been designated for just this purpose. Here the refugees live under appalling conditions and resort to unnatural, dishonest behavior and cunning deeds. Margaritis tries not to get involved in all the unspeakable atrocities unfolding before him, at quite some psychological cost.Read More »

Very interesting cast in this 1936 British film that predates A DOUBLE LIFE by nearly a decade.

Miriam Hopkins plays a secretary who alters a scathing review of an actor in OTHELLO at his wife’s (Gertrude Lawrence) behest. The wife turns out to be correct and the actor (Sebastian Shaw) goes on to become the rage of London’s West End.

Hopkins then becomes obsessed with the actor and starts going to all the performances of the play. Shaw then become smitten with Hopkins and we get a parallel story of jealousy and rage finally played out on the stage as Shaw’s Othello tries to kill Lawrence’s Desdemona. All very intriguing and very well played with bits of humor here and there.Read More »

Synopsis:
‘While doing his job as a delivery driver, Paul stumbles into a violent domestic argument. Just as the well-to-do couple are coming to blows, he intervenes to prevent the violence from going further. The two turn to him to judge the merit of their disagreements and invite him to dinner. What follows becomes a small adventure in understanding for everyone.’
– Clarke FountainRead More »

Plot Synopsis Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide
Over the course of five decades, a naïve ticket girl living in rural Communist China finds her life gradually shaped by the decrees of her government and the route of the Xiangyang bus in director Zhang Jiarui’s emotionally sweeping tale of loyalty and maturity. Li Chunfen (Zhang Jingchu) is unwaveringly loyal to her government, and always assumes that they have her best interests in mind. A cheerful teen who works aboard a bus that travels the route between Longze and Xiangyang, Li admires crusty driver Old Cui (Fan Wei), and develops a warm puppy love for handsome young doctor Liu Fendou (Nie Yuan).Read More »

Adapted by Julian Barry from his own Broadway play, Lenny manages to be both brutally frank and highly romanticized in detailing the short life and career of influential, controversial stand-up comedian Lenny Bruce. The chronology hops, skips and jumps between Lenny (Dustin Hoffman) in his prime and the burned-out, strung-out performer who, in the twilight of his life, used his nightclub act to pour out his personal frustrations at great, boring length. We watch as up-and-coming comic Bruce courts his “Shiksa goddess,” a stripper named Honey (Valerie Perrine). With family responsibilities, Lenny is encouraged to do a “safe,” conformist act, but he can’t do it.Read More »

Quote:
Ivan Got His Gun. Sam Fuller once declared that the only way for cinema to depict war authentically was to spray the audiences with real bullets, here’s the next best thing. The setting is the Nazi devastation of Belarus, the Exodus and the Apocalypse are the main poles: The 12-year-old protagonist (Alexei Kravchenko) digs up a rifle and eagerly runs to join the partisans in the woods, Elem Klimov proceeds to wipe the smile off the wannabe warrior’s face. Left behind, the boy spends an incongruous idyll with a forest nymph (Olga Mironova), complete with rainbows materializing out of morning rain; a squashed bird’s nest sets the stage for the inferno, which is first glimpsed — casually, mind-scarringly — by the side of a cabin. Bombs and bottles rain from the sky, Klimov’s Steadicam skims supernaturally pale meadows, a full menagerie (stork, cow, lemur, lobster) adds to the surrealism.Read More »

Synopsis wrote:
In ‘Gegen die Wand’ Cahit, a 40-something male from Mersin in Turkey has removed everything Turkish from his life. He has become an alcoholic drug addict and at the start of the movie wants to end it all. Sibel a 20-something female from Hamburg wishes to please her Turkish parents yet yearns for freedom. She has had her nose broken by her brother for being seen holding hands with a boy and yet she can not break her mother’s heart and run away. She too attempts suicide and she first approaches Cahit there at the Hospital. Sibel asks Cahit to marry her, as she believes this to be the way out of her parent’s house. She promises Cahit that their relationship will be like roommates, not like a married couple. The film follows Sibel and Cahit as they get married, become closer and eventually fall in love.Read More »