Drama

Synopsis:
In a poor neighborhood of New York, the bitter and lonely Jewish pawnbroker Sol Nazerman is a survivor from Auschwitz that has no emotions or feelings. Sol lost his dearest family and friends in the war and his faith in God and belief in mankind. Now he only cares for money and is haunted by daydreams, actually flashbacks from the period of the concentration camp. Sol’s assistant is the ambitious Latino Jesus Ortiz, who wants to learn with Sol how to run a business of his own. When Sol realizes that the obscure laundry business he has with the powerful gangster Rodriguez comes also from brothels, Sol recalls the fate of his beloved wife in the concentration camp and has a nervous breakdown. His attitude leads Jesus Ortiz to tragedy and Sol finds a way to cry.Read More »

After ten years away, Jacques Pruez, an unmarried, 50-year-old, modestly successful actor, returns to his home village to comfort his dying mother. His father Yvan, a family barber who’s counting on his “successful” son to support him in his old age, refuses to believe that his wife is sick and insists that her doctors are killing her. She dies, and Jacques finds out that Yvan is not his real father. Besieged by memories of his childhood, the village and the past, Jacques wanders the streets at night, reliving the moments that set him apart from the rest….Read More »

In this testament to the special bond between a mother and her son adapted from French author Romain Gary’s loosely autobiographical novel of the same name, Charlotte Gainsbourg turns in an exuberant performance as Nina, Gary’s overbearing single mother, while Pierre Niney plays Gary as an adult. Hounding the boy at every turn – from his difficult childhood in Poland, to his adolescence in the South of France, to his World War II adventures as a Free French bombardier – Nina makes it clear that she expects her son to become a great writer, a war hero, a French ambassador, and a Knight of the Legion of Honour. Despite bursts of resistance and the obstacles imposed by anti-Semitism in both Poland and France, Gary is determined to realise his mother’s monumental aspirations…Read More »

Synopsis:
In 1912, the notorious and violent prisoner Robert Franklin Stroud is transferred to the Leavenworth Prison convicted for murdering a man. When a guard cancels the visit of his mother, Elizabeth Stroud, due to a violation of the internal rules, he stabs and kills the guard and goes to trial three times. He is sentenced to be executed by the gallows, but his mother appeals to President Woodrow Wilson who commutes his sentence to life imprisonment. However, the warden, Harvey Shoemaker, decides to keep Stroud in solitary for the rest of his life. One day, Stroud finds a sparrow that has fallen from the nest in the yard and he raises the bird until it is strong enough to fly. Stroud finds a motivation for his life raising and caring for birds and becomes an expert in birds. He marries Stella Johnson and together they run a business, providing medicine developed by Stroud. But a few years after, Stroud is transferred to Alcatraz and has to leave his birds behind.Read More »

A shepherd falls in love with an English tourist in Greece (imdb)Read More »

Quote:
The real life of Tommaso Buscetta the so called “boss of the two worlds”, first mafia informant in Sicily 1980’s.Read More »

“Charlotte et son Jules was made the year before Breathless and in many ways prefigures the arrival of that major film. Shot entirely in or from a single hotel room, it centres on Jules, played by Jean-Paul Belmondo who delivers a rapid-fire tirade about his girlfriend and their relationship when she turns up back in the apartment. The poverty of the production is indicated by the fact that the voice of the Belmondo character is that of Godard himself. But its machine gun dialogue and restless jump-cutting camera is almost an advance preview of the long sort of love scene between Michel and Patricia in Patricia’s tiny apartment in Breathless.”Read More »

The second of Nikkatsu’s trilogy of softcore melodramas looking at prostitution in various Japanese cities, this dark look at ritualistic temple sex in Edo from director Noboru Tanaka is quite a departure from the light, comic tone of Chusei Sone’s Maruhi: Joro Ichiba. Resembling nothing so much as an Asian version of all those Roman-set Italian sex films of the 1970s, the film deals with various members of Japanese royalty subjecting women to sadomasochistic sexual practices in the temple for supposedly religious reasons. Rie Nakagawa stars with Yuri Yamashina, Moeko Ezawa, and Hijiri Abe.
~ Robert Firsching, All Movie GuideRead More »

In a small convent school in rural Quebec, Mother Augustine provides a musical education to young women no matter their socio-economic background. However, with the looming changes brought by Vatican II and Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, the school’s future is at peril.Read More »