AMG: Lisa Cholodenko wrote and directed this lesbian-themed drama, winner of the 1998 Sundance Film Festival’s Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. Ambitious photography magazine associate editor Syd (Radha Mitchell) has a ho-hum relationship with James (Gabriel Mann). Investigating a ceiling leak, she enters the apartment of her neighbor, retired photographer Lucy Berliner (Ally Sheedy), who lives with former Fassbinder actress Greta (Patricia Clarkson), a heroin addict. The friendship between the worldly Lucy and the naive, insecure Syd ripens into an affair, one destined to change the lives of both women.Read More »
Jafar Panahi is banned from making movies by the Iranian government, he poses as a taxi driver and makes a movie about social challenges in Iran. (IMDb) Quote: One can wonder how is it possible that the Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, who was sentenced by the authoritarian regime of his country to 20 years without making cinema, still manages to direct clandestine masterpieces with a disarming simplicity, emotional truthfulness, social-political awareness, and delightfully humorous situations. Well, my theory is the following: if you really love what you do and have something to say, there’s nothing that can stop you.Read More »
Orson Welles‘ (“Citizen Kane”) black and white low-budget film ingenuously chronicles the life of the fictional Shakespearean character named Falstaff (Orson Welles) in the period of 1400 to 1413. It’s lifted from five Shakespearean plays and Holinshed’s chronicles. This personal reading of English history is laced with nostalgia for “old” England as a merry place (shot on location in Spain) and mostly covers the two parts of Henry IV that revolve around the changing relationship between Falstaff and Prince Hal (Keith Baxter), the future king. Sir Ralph Richardson provides the narration for the tragi-comedy that speaks in modern terms to a contemporary audience about those who become driven by power. It’s a delightfully playful rip at history and the traditional way of filming Shakespeare that wisely mixes slapstick and tragedy, as the hero is both a clownish and tragic figure with the filmmaker’s sympathies clearly lying with the brokenhearted Falstaff after rejection by his former companion who when king heartlessly tells him “I know thee not old man.” Welles accomplishes this Shakespeare treatment in his own unique style, using his trademark low angle camera shots and deep focus cinematography, but without changing a word of the bard’s dialogue.Read More »
Classic Film Guide wrote: Nominated for Best B&W Art Direction-Interior Decoration and Best Music Score, this World War II drama chronicles the degradation of Martin Schulz (played by Paul Lukas), an American-German art dealer who returns to live in Germany just before the rise of the National Socialist Party. Preying (in part) on his ego, a local baron-Nazi Party member (Carl Esmond) gradually influences Schulz to abandon his principles and his Jewish friend-American partner Max Eisenstein (Morris Carnovsky), with whom Schulz had been corresponding by letter. Peter van Eyck plays Schulz’s son Heinrich, who remains in the States working for Max while Mady Christians plays Max’s daughter Elsa, Heinrich’s fiancée-actress who finds work in Germany and bravely resists a Nazi’s (Charles Halton) censorship, with tragic results. When Schulz finally realizes what he’s lost, it’s too late. The movie’s title doesn’t come into play until the end, which features a twist. Directed by Academy Award winning Art Director William Cameron Menzies (Tempest (1928)), and based on the story by Kressmann Taylor with a screenplay by Herbert Dalmas, the film is a timely and effective reminder of the power of charismatic leaders and the vigilance needed to resist their rhetoric. Emory Parnell and Frank Faylen both appear as letter carriers. Read More »
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Isaac is a young photographer living in a boarding house in Régua. In the middle of the night, he receives an urgent call from a wealthy family to come and take the last photograph of their daughter, Angelica, who died just a few days after her wedding. Arriving at the house of mourning, Isaac gets his first glimpse of Angelica and is overwhelmed by her beauty. As soon as he looks at her through the lens of his camera, the young woman appears to come back to life just for him. Isaac instantly falls in love with her. From that moment on, Angelica will haunt him night and day, until exhaustion.Read More »
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Toshiya Fujita (藤田 敏八 Fujita Toshiya, January 16, 1932 – August 30, 1997), also known as Shigeya Fujita (藤田繁矢 Fujita Shigeya), was a Japanese film director, film actor, and screenwriter. He is well-regarded in Japan for his youth films but is best known abroad for Lady Snowblood and Lady Snowblood 2: Love Song of Vengeance, films ironically not typical of his usual styleRead More »
Murphy is an American living in Paris who enters a highly sexually and emotionally charged relationship with the unstable Electra. Unaware of the effect it will have on their relationship, they invite their pretty neighbor into their bed.Read More »
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Based on the short story A Step Beyond the Gate / Krok za brame by Lech Borski).
A television feature that is considered to have been one of the pioneering films in the cinema of moral anxiety. The story of worker Antoni Gralak who is released from prison and wishes to settle down to a calm life. He fails to find peace though he does find a woman to marry and a place to live. The realities of the Polish People’s Republic cause him to enter into conflict with his construction worker colleagues who decide at one point to organise a strike, and with the manager of the construction site who wishes to make an informer of him. These complications conclude tragically. Premiered on television in 1980. @culture.pl Read More »
A young, naive and enthusiastic theater director named Kai comes to a grim provincial town to put on Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Although the lethargic theater company shows no interest in the play, his spirit remains undaunted. Meanwhile, it is fall 1989. The world is changing and somewhere, far away in the capital, a revolution is taking place and it seems that wishes might come true. Great hopes emerge in the little town and unexpected events overtake Kai’s mutating production. —DEFA Film LibraryRead More »
