Drama

SYNOPSIS/PLOT: When the ship’s owner goes bankrupt, the crew learns there is a lien on the ship and that key crew members must stay on board. Six men trapped aboard a ship sailing to Egypt. Read More »

In recent years, director Toshio Masuda has worked on the international stage with action-oriented movies such as Tora! Tora! Tora! and the Space Cruiser Yamato films. But he began his career in the middle-late 1950s with The Perfect Game (aka Kanzen Na Yuugi), a shockingly amoral tale of delinquency, rape, and murder that was to Japan, what In Cold Blood was to American cinema. It was among the earliest works in the career of a director who has generated little except major box office hits in Japan since the 1950s. …says Criterion. Or in short: young Akira Kobayashi of Nikkatsu’s diamond line fame’s cool combined with a tale about a heist which goes terribly wrong.Read More »

Synopsis
A group of young people are organizing. One night, they face the police who came to evacuate an African squat. Carmen meets Hussain, a young afghan poet. Crazy in love, they don’t leave each other. But a curse hangs over the city, papers are carrying death, bodies are falling. Panicked at the idea that he could get arrested, Carmen forbids him to go out, and locks herself with him. Gradually, Hussain get the feeling that she is watching him…Read More »

Review:
“Maskerade” is the second film directed by Willi Forst. While the ‘Vienna film’ had been popular since the early 1930s not least due to Forst’s work as an actor and singer, it was “Maskerade” that brought the genre to a probably never surpassed high point.

The plot, set in Vienna around 1900, seems to be feather-weight at first sight. When a nude drawing of a society lady, made by the artist Heideneck (Adolf Wohlbrück), gets into the newspaper by accident, a near scandal is caused. Heideneck saves his neck by randomly giving the name of an unknown girl as the drawing’s model. However, a romance soon develops between the artist and the girl (Paula Wessely), which causes the jealousy of Heideneck’s former girlfriend Anita (Olga Tschechowa)…Read More »

From IMDB:
A gang of six wealthy, well-dressed and well-spoken hoodlums break into a married couple’s house and rape the wife while forcing the husband to watch. Thus begins a dogged investigation by a determined detective who quickly finds that their cult-like solidarity can be a serious obstacle to breaking them.Read More »

Synopsis:
In the year 2050, the Philippines braces for the coming of the fiercest storm ever to hit the country. And as the wind and waters start to rage, poets wander the streets.

Quote:
Lav Diaz, who just won the Berlinale Silver Bear for his 8-hour film Hele Sa Hiwagang Hapis (A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery), will be in competition with the world premiere of his 16-minute short film Ang araw bago ang wakas, in which passages from Shakespeare are recited by ordinary people on the backdrop of a nocturnal city in the Philippines that’s bracing for a raging tempest.Read More »

SYNOPSIS from kviff.com:
Jiří Krejčík’s A Higher Principle, together with Weiss’s film Romeo, Juliet and Darkness (1959), was one of those Czechoslovak films at the forefront of what is characterised in literature as the second wave of war prose. After years of the schematism and trivialisation of heroic pathos, films were gradually appearing towards the end of the 1950s which treated the theme of war with greater intimacy, and the heroism of those who resisted evil and Nazi barbarity was not so apparent at first glance. Krejčík selected a story by Jan Drda written almost immediately after the liberation, whose short text he and the author considerably reshaped.Read More »

“The Seven Madmen” draws on two novels by Roberto Arlt to show us the opulent and seedy words of Buenos Aires in the 1920s. Erdosain (Alfredo Alcon) is a failed inventor who allows himself be pressured into giving up his dreams, marrying a woman he doesn’t know, and taking up a job as a bill collector that he grows to hate. A weak man, Erdosain can’t no to anyone, including an astrologer who enlists him as one of seven members in a secret anarchist society that sets out to destroy the Plaza de Mayo, Argentina’s religious, commercial and government center.

Much of the movie takes place in the working class rooming houses, brothels and tango bars of the period’s and it also shows us the era’s political and criminal underworlds. Although this a well produced picture with good costumes and sets, there is nothing glamorous about the places shown or the people who frequent them. Erdosain’s rented rooms are as sad and depressing as the life he leads that results in his embrace of violent anarchism.Read More »

Quote:
Aleksey German Jr., son of famed Russian auteur Aleksey German, comes into his own prominence with his third feature Under Electric Clouds, which took home a cinematography award following its premiere at the 2015 Berlin Film Festival. Much like his father’s cinema, German announces similar interests in existentialist societal woes impervious to logical narrative format, and exchanges deliberations of the past (his previous title, Paper Soldier takes place in 1961) for the looming future of 2017 (a date that may dawn before the title premieres in certain international markets). With production delayed so German could put the finishing touches on his father’s posthumous masterpiece, Hard to Be a God, this indictment on the decaying cultural state of Russia tuned exactly one hundred years after the Russian Revolution is a critique as obscurely damning as it elusively oblique in tone. Some spectacular imagery providing a backdrop for overly pointed dialogue manages to settle under your skin despite its sometimes mystifying qualities.Read More »