Drama

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Rebecca is a 1940 psychological/dramatic noir thriller directed by Alfred Hitchcock as his first American project, and his first film produced under his contract with David O. Selznick. The film’s screenplay was an adaptation by Joan Harrison and Robert E. Sherwood from Philip MacDonald and Michael Hogan’s adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel of the same name, and was produced by Selznick.[1] It stars Laurence Olivier as the aristocratic widower Maxim de Winter, Joan Fontaine as his second wife, and Judith Anderson as the housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers.Read More »

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The winner of four César awards, including best picture and director, Abdellatif Kechiche’s The Secret of the Grain is a stirring drama about the daily joys and struggles of a bustling French-Arab family. It has the texture of a documentary but a classic, almost Shakespearean structure: when patriarch Slimane acts on his wish to open a portside restaurant specializing in his ex-wife’s couscous and fish, the extended clan’s passions and problems explode, leading to an engrossing, suspenseful climax. With sensitivity and grit, The Secret of the Grain celebrates the role food plays in family life and gets to the core of contemporary immigrant experience.Read More »

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Alone in her empty flat, from her window Anne observes the people passing by who nervously snatch up the personal belongings and pieces of furniture she has put out on the pavement. Her final gesture of taking a ring off her finger signals she is leaving her previous life in Holland behind. She goes to Ireland, where she chooses to lead a solitary, wandering existence, striding through the austere landscapes of Connemara. During her travels, she discovers a house that is home to a hermit, Martin.Read More »

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A film adaptation of Väinö Linna’s best selling novel The Unknown Soldier (1954) and the novel’s unedited manuscript version, Sotaromaani.

The film’s setting is based on the unit Väinö Linna served in during the Continuation War, Infantry Regiment 8 (Finnish: Jalkaväkirykmentti 8). It follows a fictional Finnish Army machine gun company in the Karelian front from mobilisation in 1941 to armistice in 1944. The soldiers of the company are sympathetic but realistic portraits of men from all over Finland with widely varying backgrounds. Their attitude is relaxed, disrespectful of formalities, and business-like, even childish and jolly, throughout the story despite the war and the losses the company suffers. The film also occasionally shifts to the homefront.Read More »

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Had Dame Agatha Christie’s “Murder on the Orient Express” been made into a movie 40 years ago (when it was published here as “Murder on the Calais Coach”), it would have been photographed in black-and-white on a back lot in Burbank or Culver City, with one or two stars and a dozen character actors and studio contract players. Its running time would have been around 67 minutes and it could have been a very respectable B-picture.

“Murder on the Orient Express” wasn’t made into a movie 40 years ago, and after you see the Sidney Lumet production that opened yesterday at the Coronet, you may be both surprised and glad it wasn’t. An earlier adaptation could have interfered with plans to produce this terrifically entertaining super-valentine to a kind of whodunit that may well be one of the last fixed points in our inflationary universe.Read More »

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A prestigious Stockholm museum’s chief art curator finds himself in times of both professional and personal crisis as he attempts to set up a controversial new exhibit.Read More »

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Leon Prochnik adapted the evocative Robert Moresco play Child’s Play for the screen, with Sidney Lumet assuming directorial duties. Beau Bridges stars as a young teacher at an exclusive Catholic boy’s boarding school named Paul Reis. An outbreak of violence and brutality among the students has Reis perplexed. He suspects that one of the older professors is responsible for inciting the mayhem. The two most likely suspects, played by James Mason and Robert Preston, are long-standing rivals who blame each other for the student turmoil. One of the old enemies goes so far as to discredit the other — but his motives are at great odds with the religious doctrine taught within the school’s walls.Read More »

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In spite of the palpable ubiquity of misogyny across many diverse quarters of the Arabic world, filmic representation of the Middle Eastern female subaltern often feels reductive, and at its most egregious it can seem a subtle endorsement of the very behavior it ostensibly means to penetrate and vilify. Though not quite an unintentional apologia for sexism, the Turkish film Bliss is an illustration of how inadequate fiction can be at tackling the über-sober topic of sexual victimization. Mere hours before the movie’s first scene, young adult Meryem (Özgü Namal) is brutally violated and left for dead on a pastoral beach adjacent to her small village; despite the glaringly nonconsensual nature of the forced coupling she’s endured, her community ostracizes her as a strumpet per tradition and has her ushered out of town to be executed by Cemal (Murat Han), a male cousin returning from military service. In the first two acts Cemal wrestles with his own demons (mostly yawningly recondite combat flashbacks) as he struggles to maintain cultural dignity at the cost of committing what he clearly views to be senseless murder, and Meryem is a tangle of frayed nerves that we suspect obscure some painfully trite twists (we’re correct).Read More »

Synopsis:
Dr. Braun is forbidden to practice medicine because he’s a Jew living in Nazi occupied Czechoslovakia. He’s old, seems resigned about the fate of the Jews, and even works in the Department of Confiscation of Jewish Property. One day a neighbor asks him to assist a wounded political fugitive. Dr. Braun reluctantly operates to remove the bullet, but warns that plenty of morphine will soon be needed in order to keep the man from screaming when he awakes, which would attract unwanted attention. After some soul searching, Dr. Braun decides to redeem himself and reclaim his identify as a person and doctor by continuing to provide assistance. His search for the scarce morphine takes him on a nightmarish journey which includes a brothel where local women are forced to be prostitutes for German soldiers, a bar where the locals try to drown their misery in booze and dancing, and a Jewish insane asylum with a high suicide rate. Meanwhile, in a world where there is constant propaganda instructing people to report any suspicious or disloyal activities, it may only be a matter of time before someone in Dr. Braun’s apartment building call in the state police.— TimeNTide (IMDb)Read More »