Drama

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Based upon a true incident in 1930s Japan, Nagisa Oshima’s controversial film effectively skirts the borderline between pornography and art — making Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris of four years earlier look like children’s programming in comparison. The story concerns servant and former prostitute Sada Abe (Eiko Matsuda) who becomes sexually obsessed with her employer Kizicho (Tatsuya Fuji), a businessman, after seeing him making love to his wife. After making love to Sada, Kizicho becomes obsessed with her as well. As their love-making becomes more and more intense, they find themselves unable to separate themselves from each other, until every waking hour is spent in more and more dangerous sexual acts with Sada becoming more and more of the aggressor. Finally, for the ultimate in eroticism, Kizicho agrees to be strangled during sexual ecstasy for the ultimate in orgasmic fulfillment.Read More »

In 17th-century France, Father Urbain Grandier seeks to protect the city of Loudun from the corrupt establishment of Cardinal Richelieu. Hysteria occurs within the city when he is accused of witchcraft by a sexually repressed nun.

Alice Stoehr wrote:
With this film, Russell pushed his then-nascent penchant for extreme imagery of sex and violence as far as it could go. It makes up The Devils’ thematic core, expressing myriad ideas about lust, greed, power, etc. through explicit acts of unremitting cruelty. Nothing is here just for the shock value, though certainly that’s part of it.Read More »

Late Fassbinder melodrama. In Switzerland German singer ‘Willie’ falls in love with Jewish composer ‘Robert’ who offers resistance to the Nazis by helping refugees. But his family thinks that ‘Willie’ is also a Nazi and may be a risk for them. One day ‘Willie’ helps ‘Robert’ but has to stay in Germany. As Willie starts to sing the song ‘Lili Marleen’ she becomes very famous and every soldier hears that song via radio at 8 pm. Although even Hitler wants to meet her she still does not forget ‘Robert’ and helps to smuggle photos of concentration camps to the free Switzerland. When ‘Robert’ wants to visit her he is captured he can finally get free again but he will never see Willie again until war is over.Read More »

from IMDB: In São Paulo, the weird and romantic piano player Martin (Felipe Camargo) believes in serendipity and invents a game to find the woman of his dreams. He previously selects a route in the subway, and in the wagon, he chases a woman to see if her destiny is the same as his. Following his procedures, he meets Tania (Daniela Escobar), the mother of an autistic girl; the blind writer Laura (Júlia Lemmertz); and the mysterious Ana (Maria Luisa Mendonça), a woman with a secret past, and he falls in love for Ana.Read More »

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The married Bongwan leaves home in the dark morning and sets off to work. The memories of the woman who left weigh down on him. That day Bongwan’s wife finds a love note, bursts into the office, and mistakes Areum for the woman who left.Read More »

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With her first and only feature film—a hard-luck drama she wrote, directed, and starred in—Barbara Loden turned in a groundbreaking work of American independent cinema, bringing to life a kind of character seldom seen on-screen. Set amid a soot-choked Pennsylvania landscape, and shot in an intensely intimate vérité style, the film takes up with distant and soft-spoken Wanda (Loden), who has left her husband, lost custody of her children, and now finds herself alone, drifting between dingy bars and motels, where she falls prey to a series of callous men—including a bank robber who ropes her into his next criminal scheme. An until now difficult-to-see masterpiece that has nonetheless exerted an outsize influence on generations of artists and filmmakers, Wanda is a compassionate and wrenching portrait of a woman stranded on society’s margins.Read More »

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A sequel to Laleli’de Bir Azize, and with the collaboration of practically the same team, Gemide is the story of four sailors who sit around the ship and spend their time smoking pot. Their routine life turns upside down when one of them gets mugged and badly beaten.Read More »

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The young, successful employee Alex knows finally, what he wants from life – actually, what he doesn’t want: Its life. It bores him to death. Each day the same, which is subjected to the capitalism of the local industry. In a violent fight against his own reason Alex floats now in a sump of the Nihilismus and the uncommon everyday life of a new life, which keeps something new ready behind each corner. In a world, in which one is squeezed into cages, only the egoist can survive…Read More »

Stone Wedding (Nunta de piatra) is made of two distinct segments directed by two different directors. The first part (M. Veroiu) depicts the miserable life of a widow in Romania at the beginning of the century. The second part (D. Pita) is about a bride on the day of her wedding. The best part of both movies is the soundtrack by Dorin Liviu Zaharia, Dan Andrei Aldea and Sfinx.Read More »