Drama

  • Dustin Guy Defa – Bad Fever (2011)

    Drama2011-2020Dustin Guy DefaMumblecoreUSA

    A humorless loner attempts to win the admiration of a drifter with his debut performance at the local comedy club

    The Village Voice wrote:
    The shaky handheld cinematography might be conventionally modern, but from its opening white-letters-on-red-background credit sequence to its diligent focus on a wayward loner drifting about the outskirts of society and sanity, Bad Fever has the empathetic soul of ’70s American filmmaking. Writer-director Dustin Guy Defa’s stark indie trains its character-study gaze on Eddie (Kentucker Audley), a socially dysfunctional twentysomething who—while living at home with his dour mom (Annette Wright), hanging out in empty diners, and entertaining stand-up comedy dreams by recording anecdotes on cassette—strikes up a random romance with Irene (Eleonore Hendricks), who lives in an abandoned school and has a fondness for kinky videotaping. Read More »

  • Lynn Hershman-Leeson – Teknolust (2002)

    2001-2010DramaLynn Hershman-LeesonSci-FiUSA

    Anxious to use artificial life to improve the world, Rosetta Stone, (Tilda Swinton), a bio-geneticist creates a Recipe for Cyborgs and uses her own DNA in order to breed three Self Replicating Automatons, part human, part computer named Ruby, Olive and Marine (also played by Tilda Swinton). The SRA’s act as ‘portals’ on the internet, helping users to fulfill their dreams. The SRA’s are nourished through touch. Because they were bred only with Rosetta’s DNA, they need the balance of an X chromo or male sperm to survive. Read More »

  • Laurence Olivier – Richard III [+Commentary] (1955)

    1951-1960ClassicsDramaLaurence OlivierUnited KingdomWilliam Shakespeare

    Plot: Richard III is a 1955 British film adaptation of William Shakespeare’s historical play of the same name, also incorporating elements from his Henry VI, Part 3. It was directed and produced by Sir Laurence Olivier, who also played the lead role. The cast includes many noted Shakespearean actors, including a quartet of acting knights. The film depicts Richard plotting and conspiring to grasp the throne from his brother King Edward IV, played by Sir Cedric Hardwicke. In the process, many are killed and betrayed, with Richard’s evil leading to his own downfall. The prologue of the film states that history without its legends would be “a dry matter indeed”, implicitly admitting to the artistic licence that Shakespeare applied to the events of the time.Read More »

  • Christopher Makoto Yogi – August at Akiko’s (2018)

    2011-2020Christopher Makoto YogiDramaUSA

    Armed with just his suitcase and a sax, cosmopolitan musician Alex Zhang Hungtai (from the band Dirty Beaches) returns home to the Big Island of Hawaii having been away for nearly a decade. Hungtai, playing a fictional version of himself, takes refuge in a Buddhist B&B with a woman named Akiko (Akiko Matsuda, playing herself). Alex’s experimental free jazz music at first collides with the bell sounds of Akiko’s meditation, but as the film evolves and a friendship develops, the two harmonize.Read More »

  • Jazmín López – Leones AKA Lions (2012)

    2011-2020ArgentinaDramaJazmín LópezMystery

    Quote:
    Five young people are involved in a serious car accident that leaves four of them dead. Isabel, the youngest, is the only survivor and helps her four friends realize they have passed on.Read More »

  • John Ford – Young Mr. Lincoln (1939)

    1931-1940DramaJohn FordPoliticsUSA

    Synopsis:
    Few historical figures are as revered as Abraham Lincoln, and few director-star pairings embody classic American cinema as perfectly as do John Ford and Henry Fonda. In Young Mr. Lincoln, their first collaboration, Fonda gives one of the finest performances of his career as the young president-to-be struggling with an incendiary murder case as a novice lawyer. Compassionate and assured, this indelible piece of Americana marks the beginning of Ford and Fonda’s ascent to legendary status.Read More »

  • Nyrki Tapiovaara & Hugo Hytönen – Miehen tie AKA One Man’s Fate (1940)

    Drama1931-1940FinlandHugo HytönenNyrki TapiovaaraRomance

    The fifth and last film of Nyrki Tapiovaara (1911–40), released posthumously after his tragically premature death during the last days of the Winter War, and finished by one of the film’s actors, Hugo Hytönen, with some help from Erik Blomberg and Mirjami Kuosmanen, future collaborators on The White Reindeer. As with Tapiovaara’s earlier films Stolen Death (1938) and Kaksi Vihtoria (“Two Henpecked Husbands”, 1939), Blomberg was the film’s producer and cinematographer, while Kuosmanen had one of her first major roles in the film. The film was an adaptation of recent Nobel laureate F. E. Sillanpää’s 1932 novel and, along with Teuvo Tulio’s rural melodramas of the late ’30s (including one Sillanpää adaptation, the now-lost Nuorena nukkunut), one of the crucial trope-setters for Finnish cinema in the years to come, with its depictions of breathtaking landscapes, love on the hayfield, and drunken brawls at country dances.Read More »

  • Joan Tewkesbury – Old Boyfriends (1979)

    1971-1980DramaJoan TewkesburyUSA

    John Belushi was the high school sweetheart who ruined her reputation with lies. Richard Jordan was the college lover that she almost married. Keith Carradine is the unstable brother of her first real love. Talia Shire is Diane Cruise a woman whose life has shattered in a myriad of pieces after the dissolution of her marriage she desides to delve into her past and seek out the men who marked the milestones of her life.Read More »

  • George Stevens – Penny Serenade (1941)

    1941-1950ClassicsDramaGeorge StevensUSA

    Synopsis:
    As Julie prepares to leave her husband Roger, she begins to play through a stack of recordings, each of which reminds her of events in their lives together. One of them is the song that was playing when she and Roger first met in a music store. Other songs remind her of their courtship, their marriage, their desire for a child, and the joys and sorrows that they have shared. A flood of memories comes back to her as she ponders their present problems and how they arose.Read More »

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