Drama

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“Filipinas, farewell! Long live the Republic and may our independence be born in the future!”

Those were Macario Sakay’s last words before he was executed by hanging on September 13, 1907 for treason. His real crime was patriotism, breaking rank with the leaders who sold out the Philippine Revolution to the United States and waging a guerrilla resistance against the American colonial government. They called he and his soldiers “banditos,” a label which has stuck in the minds of many Filipinos generations later (that is, if they even remember his name). His existence in Philippine history negates the official narrative that the Philippine-American war ended in 1902. True patriots continued to invoke his name as a symbol of the unfinished revolution. It would take nearly 90 years after his death before director Raymond Red’s “Sakay” (1993), one of the most accessible and well-crafted bio-pics ever made in the Philippines.Read More »

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Like many of the other commentators here, I had heard about this movie long before I had ever had a chance to see it, although it typically is mentioned as one of Spain’s greatest films. It definitely is. It is masterfully directed and I have not been able to stop thinking about it for days.Read More »

From the Chicago Reader
A watershed in the history of Chinese cinema, this first feature (1998) directed by Lu Yue–the remarkable cinematographer of Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl and several recent features of Zhang Yimou, including Shanghai Triad–is an eye-opening comedy about adultery in contemporary Shanghai. Much of the dialogue is improvised by the talented actors–Shi Jingming as the husband, a professor of traditional Chinese medicine; Zhang Zhihua as his factory-worker wife; and Chen Yinan as his mistress and former student–and both the shooting style and the emotional directness of the performances suggest the filmmaking of John Cassavetes.Read More »

IMDB:
1945, Leningrad. WWII has devastated the city, demolishing its buildings and leaving its citizens in tatters, physically and mentally. Two young women search for meaning and hope in the struggle to rebuild their lives amongst the ruins.Read More »

10 Years Thailand is a collection of short films by five Thai directors imagining their country ten years into the future. The project is a continuation of 10 Years, a Hong Kong film produced in 2015 that posed the same question to five Hong Kong directors.

Featuring shorts by: Aditya Assarat, Wisit Sasanatieng, Chulayarnnon Siriphol, Apichatpong Weerasethakul.Read More »

Summary from Icarus Films:
A family on the Himalayan plains discovers their dog is worth a fortune, but selling it comes at a terrible price.

The Tibetan nomad mastiff is an exotic prize dog in China, fetching as much as millions of dollars from wealthy Chinese. When a young man notices several thefts of mastiffs from Tibetan farm families, he decides to sell his family’s dog before it is stolen and sold on the black market. His father, an aging Tibetan herder, is furious when he discovers their dog missing. When the father seeks to buy the dog back, it leads to a series of tragicomic events that threaten to tear the family apart, while showing the erosion of Tibetan culture under the pressures of contemporary society.Read More »

Ashes of Paradise (Spanish: Cenizas del Paraíso) is a 1997 Argentine film from director Marcelo Piñeyro. It tells in cutbacks how the untroubled private happiness of a family – a judge and his three grown-up sons – crumbles between loyalty and betrayal, blind trust and suspicions.

The film won several awards, among them a renowned Goya Award, for Best Spanish Language Foreign Film (Mejor Película Extranjera de Habla Hispana). It was Argentina’s official submission for the 1997 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film (“Oscar”), but did not receive a nomination for the award.Read More »

Plot Synopsis by Eleanor Mannikka
With dialogue ranging from flat to offensive and acting in the same range, this low-brow erotic crime drama by director Terence Young stars Jayne Mansfield as Midnight Franklin, a star stripper in a Soho club that is in serious rivalry with another strip joint. A reporter gets involved in the strip scene while writing a story on the clubs, and in the end he has quite a lot to write about. The competition between the two clubs heats up, and after one of the owners is the unknowing instrument in the death of a young (illegally young) stripper, both rival clubs head for a crash.Read More »

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This movie is probably as close to a chick flick as Raizo ever made! But there’s still good action and a very inventive sword fight at the end. Raizo fans cannot resist him any way. Info is sparse on this film, just recently translated into English, and once again, I rely on Paghat the Ratgirl for a review of this film:

Kiba-no-Masakichi, Masa for short, is a lumber worker who falls in love with Oshima (Tamao Nakamura) almost at first sight, in The One & Only Girl I Ever Loved (Nakayama shichiri, 1962).Read More »