Quote:
After a failed attempt at working on a foreign film set, 26 year-old Ana returns to her hometown of Strasbourg. Over the scorching summer that follows, she decides to replace her grandmother’s bathtub with a walk-in shower, eat peas and carrots with ketchup, drive a Porsche, harvest plums, lose her driver’s license, sleep with her best friend and get back together with her ex. In short, over this particular summer, Ana tries to get her life together.Read More »
Synopsis:
William Wyler’s dark and poisonous melodrama, based on the W. Somerset Maugham novel, features Bette Davis in one of her nastiest roles. The story begins in the shimmering moonlight on a tropical Malayan rubber plantation. Shots ring out and a wounded man, Geoffrey Hammond (David Newell) staggers from a bungalow as Leslie Crosbie (Bette Davis) coldly follows him, pumping the remaining bullets into his body. She later tells her husband Robert (Herbert Marshall) that she shot Geoffrey, a mutual friend, because he was drunk and tried to take advantage of her. Robert, who owns the plantation, believes her story and hires high-powered lawyer Howard Joyce (James Stephenson) to defend her. Read More »
Director Konrad Wolf’s gritty and controversial tale follows two young women who go to work at a uranium mine in Wismut, East Germany. With anarchists, former S.S. soldiers, and ex-Russian officers working in close proximity, the mine becomes a microcosm of world politics and social unrest.Read More »
Synopsis:
After a drunken binge on the San Pablo waterfront, longshoreman Bobo fears he may have killed a man. In his uncertainty, he takes a job on an isolated bait barge. That night, he rescues lovely Anna from a watery suicide attempt and installs her on the barge. But Tiny, Bobo’s longtime pal and parasite, hopes to drive Anna away before domestic bliss tears Bobo away from him; the still unsolved murder may be just the wedge Tiny needs. There’s fog on the water and evil brewing…Read More »
Quote:
After witnessing a crime during his night shift as railway switchman near the docks, a man finds a briefcase full of money. While he and his family step up their living standards, others start looking for the disappeared case.
Sight and Sound wrote:
Béla Tarr’s latest film may initially appear to be his most conventional work to date, but the Hungarian director hasn’t softened his uncompromising worldview in ‘The Man from London’.By Michael Brooke
The extinction of the aesthetically and intellectually rigorous European art film has been predicted for so long (in the early 1980s, a Sight & Sound columnist called for the creation of a Society for the Protection of the Art Movie) that the mere fact of Hungarian auteur Béla Tarr continuing to direct films without making the smallest concession to popular fashion is a cause for celebration.Read More »
Museum of Modern Art writes:
In 1946, John Ford effectively took over the crew of his friend and fellow spirit Fernández—including stars Dolores del Río, Pedro Armendáriz, and Miguel Inclán, and cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa—and, with Fernández acting as his “first lieutenant,” filmed this abstract, ambitious work on locations in Mexico and at the Churubusco Studios. Ostensibly an adaptation of Graham Greene’s unfilmably scandalous The Power and the Glory, it derives many of its plot points from Ford’s 1935 The Informer, though the film’s ultimate subject is the Mexican landscape, as explored in all of its compositional possibilities by the incomparable duo of Ford and Figueroa.Read More »
Synopsis(from All Movie Guide):
Living a dismal life taking care of his uncommunicative and nearly blind father, Vincent (Fabrice Luchini), a sculptor, tries to make life better for himself but fails for a variety of reasons.Read More »
REVIEW by Angus Wolfe Murray (from eyeforfilm.co.uk):
When Smilla Jasperson came home that winter’s day in Copenhagen, the boy lay dead on the pavement. He had been playing on the roof, the police said, and probably slipped on ice.
She was friends with the boy, a six-year-old Greenlandic Inuit, who lived with his alcoholic mother one floor down in her apartment block. She knew he had a fear of heights and would never have been up there unless something, or someone, had forced him.Read More »
Quote:
‘Olive Trees’: Bears Message
By Desson Howe
Washington Post Staff Writer
July 19, 1996
“Through the Olive Trees,” Abbas Kiarostami’s subtly involving faux-documentary, acquaints you directly with the time-consuming, spiritually enervating process of filmmaking. But there’s more to it than that. A film-within-a-film drama, it’s about a movie crew that is recruiting amateur actors in a mountainous region of Iran for a romance called “And Life Goes On‚. . .‚.” The area has just been devastated by an earthquake. Homes are crumbled and deserted. Many people are now living by the side of the highway. But the upheaval doesn’t preclude local excitement. Kids skip school and hike five miles to watch the filming. Girls, their heads draped in chadors, vie shyly to be chosen for a part.Read More »