Drama

Quote:
Road movies haven’t been a staple of Québecois cinema. Yet recently, there were two examples and I watched them back to back. One is the very low-key Papa à la chasse aux lagopèdes, a superb odyssey of one man driving north to find himself. A very original movie where there is basically just one character in a monologue with the camera he just purchased. The same François Papineau of that movie would go on to play one of the two main characters in Route 132. He is not well-known, but seeing these two may convince you to look forward to his next project. As they are two here, rather than just one, Route 132 turns to the troublesome nature of male friendship, similar to what Paris, Texas did for brotherly love. Both of these Quebec road movies, as a negative review point out underneath, have very little in term of story to tell. It isn’t Lost Highway or anything like that, it just lack any sort of paradigm, it’s flawed and it flirt with caricature at times, but remain interesting throughout, as are most of Louis Bélanger movies and especially Gaz Bar Blues, it’s more about the characters than the story and the locationsRead More »

All Movie Guide wrote:
Midnight Express is a harrowing tale of a naïve American caught in a nightmare of his own making thousands of miles from his home. Billy Hayes (Brad Davis) is an American tourist visiting Turkey with his girlfriend Susan (Irene Miracle) when he’s caught by customs officials trying to smuggle a large amount of hashish out of the country. The crime would normally carry a sentence of four years, but officials decide to make an example of Billy, and he draws a 30-year sentence despite the promises of his Turkish legal counsel. While Susan and Billy’s father (Mike Kellin) pledge to do everything they can to speed Billy’s release, in fact there’s little than can be done. Billy quickly finds himself in a hellish prison that’s a nightmare of filth, violence, rape, inedible food, and unspeakable health conditions. However, Billy gains a few confidantes behind bars: Jimmy (Randy Quaid), an American in a constant state of emotional overdrive; Max (John Hurt), an intelligent, drug-addicted Englishman; and Erich (Norbert Weisser), a gay Scandinavian who is attracted to Billy but accepts his gentle refusals of sex. Before long, Billy is convinced that he can take no more, and he makes plans to take the “midnight express” — jailhouse slang for escape. While his friends are willing to help, they also make clear that almost no one who has tried to escape has lived to tell the tale. Based on a true story, Midnight Express was a box-office hit which won wide acclaim for the performances of Brad Davis and John Hurt; and the screenplay, by Oliver Stone, won an Academy Award.Read More »

In the 1950’s, Ludvik Jahn was expelled from the Communist Party and the University by his fellow students, because of a politically incorrect note he sent to his girlfriend. Fifteen years later, he tries to get his revenge by seducing Helena, the wife of one of his accusers.Read More »

The last theatrical film by Marcel Camus based on the identically named novel by Jorge Amado. Set in Bahia, the film presents three interconnected stories set amongst prostitutes, cardsharpers, pimps, drunks and homeless Don Juans and Messalinas in the teeming life of a tropical port.Read More »

Occupying a delicious place between Victorian melodrama and superhero comic books, Judex is one of the great serials from the career of French movie pioneer Louis Feuillade. From his castle lair high above the countryside, mystery man Judex (granite-faced Rene Creste) seeks to protect the lovely Jacqueline, while nursing a secret hatred for her fatcat father. Multiple kidnappings, assassination attempts, and narrow escapes follow; much of the mischief is orchestrated by wicked temptress Diana Monti (Musidora, the star of Feuillade’s Les Vampires). There’s also a delightfully overwhelmed detective (Marcel Levesque), who’s a sort of prototype of Monsieur Clouseau, and a streetwise Artful Dodger known as the Licorice Kid.Read More »

Synopsis:
Laura Rossellini, a widow from Rome, vacations on the Algarve coast one hot summer. One day while sunbathing, she finds a wounded man named Robert drifting in the surf on a rubber raft. She takes him home, and, after he is revived, learns his story. As they talk, their mutual attraction grows, until a group of armed men suddenly arrives looking for Robert.Read More »

from allmovie:
One man’s small empire threatens to collapse under the weight of his greed and deceit in this drama that transplants the story of Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge to 19th century America. In 1867, Dillon (Peter Mullan) is an Irish immigrant who settled in California during the Gold Rush of ’49 and has done quite well for himself. Dillon owns nearly every business of consequence in the town of Kingdom Come; if someone wants to dig for gold, rent a room, open a bank account, or even order a drink, they have to go to Dillon to do it. One of the few profitable enterprises in town that he doesn’t own is the brothel, which is operated by Lucia (Milla Jovovich), Dillon’s lover. Read More »

A nightclub singer loses her husband in an automobile accident, and soon afterward witnesses the murders of two narcotics agents, and suffers a nervous breakdown. The police come to believe that all three murders are related, as they had suspected her husband was involved in a heroin smuggling ring, and now they think she may have been involved in it – especially after they find a large stash of heroin hidden in her apartment. Read More »

VillageVoice Review :
So far as mental fireworks go, the Fourth of July weekend is unlikely to offer anything more spectacular than Peter Watkins’s masterpiece La Commune (Paris, 1871).Dynamic historical reconstruction in the form of an experimental documentary, Watkins’s six-hour feature was made in DV for (and largely buried by) French TV; it’s as much immersion as narrative – complicated yet lucid and contagiously exciting.Read More »