Drama

About:
It is summer in the estate on the edge of town that provides the location for Sam de Jong’s feature debut Prins. And it is hot. Any lad who has money here has got to be a wide boy. And if you are driving a Lamborghini you will definitely earn respect. The film’s young director unfolds his story with ease, infusing it with a good dose of irony and grotesque exaggeration. The boys hang out on the street, cracking pumpkin seeds, talking about motorbikes, Rolex watches and how to kiss a girl. One of them is 17-year-old Ayoub. He is head over heels in love with pretty Laura who may smile at him invitingly when she passes by, but later sends him packing with a withering look. Her boyfriend is one of the really tough guys. How on earth can Ayoub compete? He has hardly any money, shares a tiny room with his sister at home; his mother is careworn and his father lives on the streets. He has to do something. Cue the guy in the pastel-hued violet Lamborghini – a complete nut that everyone says you should just stay away from. It is going to be a long, nightmarish night for Ayoub.Read More »

Plot summary from IMDB:
Dominique Marceau is on trial for the murder of Gilbert Tellier. The counsels duel relentlessly, elaborating explanations for why the pretty, idle and fickle girl killed the talented and ambitious conductor freshly graduated from the conservatory. Was it passion, vengeance, desperation, an accident? The acquaintances of Gilbert testify, as well as Dominique’s former lovers, and her sister, Annie, the studious violin player engaged to Gilbert. The evidence they give progressively paints a more finely-shaded picture of the personalities of Dominique and Gilbert, and of their relationship, than the eloquent and convincing justifications of the counsels.Read More »

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For many, the eighties are perceived as the last party decade and remembered with nos­talgia. A time of extreme wealth, conspicuous consumption and copious drug-taking, the period was largely defined by loose eth­ics and blinkered arrogance. The situation is a little different for the denizens of Axel Petersén’s Avalon, however. They’ve never left the eighties, and they still go at it all night, regardless of the consequences.Read More »

Synopsis
Pipe (Michel Robin) has worked on the same farm for forty of his 66 years of living. Now he is in his “salad” years, and in retirement is free to explore the world in ways he never did before. He buys a small motorcycle with the help of an Italian migrant laborer and begins touring the countryside. Formerly somewhat docile, he gets into scrapes and fights, and eventually loses his cycle. Nonetheless, he has a chance to see the Alps from the sky. He has always wanted to see these legendary mountains, and is disappointed to realize that they are just big piles of rock.Read More »

(SPOILERS!)

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The best moments of A Wife’s Heart involve things not said or seen and this is most explicit in the interactions between Kiyoko (Hideko Takamine) and her bank clerk bachelor confidant Kenkichi (Toshiro Mifune). Kiyoko, along with her husband Shinji (Keiju Kobayashi), wants to open a coffee shop and so goes to Kenkichi to ask for a loan. Director Mikio Naruse never focuses on the duo’s talk of money; as filmed, their entire relationship is a series of beginnings and endings with the middles cut out. It is at first purely a business association, though after Shinji (at the manipulative behest of his matchmaker mother) gives a majority of the loan to his deadbeat brother Zenichi, Kiyoko starts to think that her feelings for Kenkichi may be more then platonic. Following through on his setup, Naruse never lets either character nakedly confess their heart’s desire. The closest they come is during a sequence, set against the backdrop of a torrential downpour, where Kenkichi utters the first few words of a thought that he will never finish. In other hands this scene might have played as masochistic repression, but Naruse allows the rainstorm to act as an expressive emotional outlet—nature thus concludes what Kenkichi cannot.Read More »

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From acquarello at Strictly Film School Blog: Hiroshi Shimizu’s government-pressured, militarism-era film A Star Athlete is a breezy, refreshingly lighthearted, and subtly subversive slice-of-life comedy that centers on an all-day student march in formation and armed combat drills through the rural countryside for military training exercises. Shimizu demonstrates his deceptively facile adeptness and virtuoso camerawork through a series of extraordinarily choreographed plan sequence shots: a track-and-field race around the campus track between the school’s start athlete Seki (Shuji Sano) and his constantly spurring – and sparring – team mate (Chishu Ryu); an extended dolly sequence of the students’ march as bemused villagers and flirtatious, love-struck young women alternately respectfully step aside, playfully trail, obliviously obstruct, and amorously chase the dashing students in uniform; a mock battlefield charge assault through muddy fields as a guilt-ridden motley crew of travelers on the road scramble to flee from the students in a mistaken belief of being chased in retribution for their petty transgressions during their brief stay in the village.Read More »

The movie tells the story of a teacher who spends one winter in a mountain village of Hakkari, a city in the farest South-eastern vorner of the Turkey. Erden Kıral depicts his struggle for teaching Turkish to children who can only speak Kurdish and the loneliness of Zazi in a poetic way and also using the landscape as a further character. The screenplat is based on the novel by Ferit Edgü and adapted by Onat Kutlar with contributions from Tezer Özlü, another famous Turkish writer. The film was awarded with Silver Berlin Bear at 1983.Read More »

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m’s first international prize-winner (best actress for Kang at Venice) is a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger attack on the principles of male lineage and ancestor worship in the traditional Korean family. It’s set in the late Yi Dynasty (late 19th century) to stress how deep rooted these things are, but its resonances are squarely contemporary. The well-born Shin and his wife are happy but lack an heir; behind his back, the family conspires with his wife to bring in a surrogate to bear him a son. Their choice is Ok-Nyo (Kang), a free-spirited girl who endures various physiological and sexual indignities (intended to ensure that she produces a boy) because she comes to like Shin and enjoy the relatively pampered life – forgetting she is there only as a servant. The emphasis on female suffering has come in for some critical stick, but Im’s analysis of Confucian blockages in the Korean psyche seems all too cogent. And his mastery of image, tone and rhythm is unassailable. TRRead More »

Thoroughbred (1936)
Tommy Dawson (Frank Leighton), would-be horse trainer, buys an emaciated stallion called Stormalong on a trip to New Zealand. When it loses its first race, the insecure Tommy vows to sell it, but Tommy’s fiancé Joan (Helen Twelvetrees), a much better judge of horses, rescues Stormalong. With Tommy’s mother, Ma Dawson (Nellie Ferguson), Joan turns Stormalong into the greatest racehorse in Australia. As the Melbourne Cup approaches, an international crime syndicate decides to kill Stormalong. Tommy has to foil the plot on race day.Read More »