Synopsis
It is the dead of winter and a poet invites his sons to join him at a hotel for a reunion. The hotel also hosts a newly single woman who has a friend keep her company and with whom she shares a room, strolls and conversations. The poet is drawn to the beautiful girls and cannot resist the temptation to discover more. Their lives intersect, connect and disconnect and potentially become a metaphor for modern life.Read More »
In what appears to be an inexplicable incident, a man drives up to a resort hotel in midwinter, throws away his car keys, enters, and proceeds to agitate everyone he meets with his urgency — a message he is somehow unable to communicate. Then he leaves, disappearing in the snow. Later, the people he appeared to have upset have gathered to search for him and find him frostbitten, but alive. Visiting him at the sanatorium to which he has been taken, they gradually discover what was really happening.Read More »
The film dramatizes November 11, 1919- a crucial date in the battle for Latvian independence. A year after the end of the official hostilities of WWI, a renegade German general and troops remain outside the Latvian capital. Latvian riflemen, most of them inexperienced volunteers, somehow managed to defeat a larger, better-armed force of German and Russian mercenaries.Read More »
Mon oncle d’Amérique (“My American Uncle”) is a 1980 French film directed by Alain Resnais. The film stars Gérard Depardieu, Nicole Garcia, and Roger Pierre.
The didactic film is built around the ideas of French physician, writer and philosopher Henri Laborit, who plays himself in the film. It uses the stories of three people to illustrate Laborit’s theories on evolutionary psychology regarding the relationship of self and society.Read More »
Synopsis:
André Fragman (baptised “Fairbanks” by his cinema projectionist father) returns from his military service with a diploma in chemistry. He expects to have no trouble finding a job, since a relative of his, Etienne, has promised him a place in his company. Meanwhile, André meets and falls in love with a student actress, Marie, who is rehearsing for a stage production of Alice in Wonderland. When André’s promised job fails to materialise, he ends up having to take manual work, but he has difficulty holding down any job he can find. Frustrated, his mood changes for the worse, and he ends up driving away Marie…Read More »
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Georgie Soloway, a pop hit love song writer who cannot love, himself, or others. He spends his days with various women flying his plane, and dropping in to the world around him.Read More »
Independent filmmaker John Sayles creates one of his more artistic works with this period feature about a volatile 1920s labor dispute in the town of Matewan, West Virginia. Matewan is a coal town where the local miners’ lives are controlled by the powerful Stone Mountain Coal Company. The company practically owns the town, reducing workers’ wages while raising prices at the company-owned supply and grocery. The citizens’ land and homes are not their own, and the future seems dim. When the coal company brings immigrants and minorities to Matewan as cheaper labor, union organizer Joe Kenehan (Chris Cooper) scours the town to unite all miners in a strike. Read More »
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James Earl Jones and Lynn Redgrave star as mutually insane neighbors in a California apartment house who become romantically involved (she thinks she’s sexually intimate with Puccini, and he periodically wrestles with a demon of his own named Hank). Charles Burnett (Killer of Sheep, The Glass Shield) directed this whimsical, bittersweet 1999 feature, handling the actors with sensitivity, but the preciousness of Anthony C. Winkler’s screenplay, adapted from his own novel, only underlines how much better off Burnett is writing his own scripts (Nightjohn being an exception). With Margot Kidder.
Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago ReaderRead More »
Synopsis:
Troubled youths Joe and Nick Lorenzo grow into very different men: Joe a small-time hoodlum and Nick an honored college graduate. When Nick falls for Joe’s girl Laurie, trouble erupts between the two men and also with the gang that has it in for Joe.Read More »