Drama

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Soon after extracting a bullet from his brother’s arm, Alex (Konstantin Lavroneko) relocates his family from the city to his father’s old house in the countryside. As the family settles into their rustic existence, Alex’s wife Vera (Maria Bonnevie) reveals that she is pregnant by another man. Enraged by his wife’s announcement, Alex consults with his brother and demands that Vera terminate the pregnancy. When the forced abortion goes horribly awry and Alex’s brother suffers a severe heart attack, a confrontation with the man Alex believes to have seduced his wife send events quickly spiraling out of control.Read More »

A newly established communist authorities in Yugoslavia face the moral challenge of how to deal with warriors of defeated side and other enemies of the regime.Read More »

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Joan Crawford won an Academy award in 1945 for Mildred Pierce, and, two years later, she was trying her utmost to win another. Her gripping, melodramatic star turn helped make Possessed a hit and a prime example of post-war film noir. Crawford can’t find happiness with either Van Heflin or Raymond Massey, and her fiery emotions drive her into a lethal frenzy. Based on Rita Weiman’s book One Man’s Secret, Possessed is told almost entirely in flashbacks, the goal being to figure out what drove Crawford’s character crazy. As a dark psychological study, this is Hollywood at its moodiest; love has rarely seemed so perilous and fraught with anxiety. German director Curtis Bernhardt was known for making emotional films that appealed to women. Crawford got her Oscar nomination, but Loretta Young won the statuette that year for The Farmer’s Daughter.Read More »

Synopsis:
Abondoned in a park, the two-year-old girl Asia is found by Patti, a circus woman living with her husband Walter in a trailer park in San Basilio on the outskirts of Rome. With the help of Tairo, a teenager who lives with his grandma in an adjacent container, Patti starts to search for the girl’s mother and gives the girl a new home for an uncertain period of time.Read More »

Nora Sayre, New York Times wrote:
Building apprehension in an audience requires a particular skill; quite often, we need to be nervous about the combination of personalities and their sudden responses to one another, their capacity for violence of craziness, in order to give a hoot about who gets chased or shot.

Edouard Molinaro’s “The Hostages,” playing today and tomorrow at the First Avenue Screening Room, is an unusually intelligent action picture, partly because it stresses how dangerous a self-destructive persons can be.The movie is based on a recent case in France. A drifter with a fearfully short fuse falls in and out of prison; between assaults and armed robberies, he marries a call girl and the hold-ups continue until they’re arrested.Read More »

Synopsis:
Upon entering high school, two best friends named Hana and Alice notice a boy a year older them while waiting for the train, and they both develop a pretty strong crush on him. One day while secretly following him home, Hana witnesses the boy walk right into a wall and pass out. When he wakes up, she lies and convinces him that he must have amnesia, because he doesn’t remember the fact that she was his girlfriend. After this, hilarity ensues as the two girls attempt to run with the lie. Of course, complications soon arise.Read More »

Synopsis:
Master thief Corey (Alain Delon) is fresh out of prison. But instead of toeing the line of law-abiding freedom, he finds his steps leading back to the shadowy world of crime, crossing those of a notorious escapee (Gian Maria Volonté) and alcoholic ex-cop (Yves Montand). As the unlikely trio plots a heist against impossible odds, their trail is pursued by a relentless inspector (Bourvil), and fate seals their destinies. Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le cercle rouge combines honorable anti-heroes, coolly atmospheric cinematography, and breathtaking set pieces to create a masterpiece of crime cinema.Read More »

The story of a family. Problems, marriage, taxes, revenge, friendship, army, life and much more…

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The movie is a portray of the inhabitants of an ordinary Romanian village,before the beginning of ww2.A dramatic story about poverty and ignorance..People ready to sacrifice their family members for a little more welfare.Sadness,misery.All seen through the eyes of a man less brutified than the others,a man who realizes his misery and tries to overcome it. It is a brutal and in the same time sensitive introspection in simple people’s life,a naked portray of their existence and inner battles.I don’t know if foreigners will find the story interesting or just repulsive but I can’t help calling it a masterpiece.The Moromete family could have been my grandparents.Read More »

From David Williams entry on Mizoguchi in World Film Directors:
The first of his pictures still extant, Furusato no uta (The Song of Home), is a studio assignment remote from Mizoguchi’s personal concerns, lauding traditional rural values over those of the wicked city, although it contains some montage experiments in the manner of Minoru Murata. The script by Ryunosuke Shimizu won a Ministry of Education award.Read More »