Drama

Plot Summary
A new shogun is appointed to the throne when his brother dies. He find out that the former Shogun one of the women from his brothers harem became pregnant, but she escaped. The new Shogun would loose the throne if the child is a boy. Genshiro is doctor who, among other things, performs abortions, and is sheltering his love, another women who escaped from the harem. The new Shogun threatens to arrest the girl unless Genshiro hunts down the woman and aborts her child. Genshiro learns that the woman releases a “musky scent from her special area” when in ecstasy. Both Genshiro and his friend set out to find all the women of the former harem and have sex with them, by force if necessary.Read More »

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One of the greatest movies about immigrant experience of coming to America is Elia Kazan’s epic journey America, America based on the stories of his uncle coming from Turkey to the United States in the early 1900’s. The title has been available previously in France and in 2010 it was released as part of Fox’s mega-set Elia Kazan Collection, but this film marks its debut on stand-alone region 1 disc. The dual-layered disc features a progressive black-and-white transfer with very good contrast and no damages on the print. There are a few problematic shots, but those were mostly from the stock footage.
The decent mono soundtrack is in English only and the disc features English and French subtitles. The lone extra is an informative commentary by Foster Hirsch. This is a highly recommended release of an underrated film that needs to be rediscovered by a wider audience.

– Gregory Meshman @ DVD BeaverRead More »

Europa (retitled Zentropa for the American release) is an hallucinatory Danish film set in postwar Germany. Jean-Marc Barr plays a young German who aspires for a job as a street conductor. But this is no mere “Joe Job;” Barr’s adventures on the line are designed as a metaphor for the emergence of the “New Europe” following the war. Barbara Sukowa costars as the daughter of a railroad magnate–and possible Nazi sympathizer. Many of the special-effects sequences are computer enhanced, but even the “live” scenes have an unsettling, surreal quality to them (colors changing abruptly, backgrounds shifting without warning, etc.) This experimental film left some viewers confused, which may be why English-language prints of Zentropa are narrated by Max Von Sydow.Read More »

City of Pirates
(La Ville des pirates, France/Portugal, 1983)

Raúl Ruiz’s City of Pirates is (de)composed under the sign of Surrealism, with its trust in ecstasy, scandal, the call of the wild, mystification, prophetic dreams, humour, the uncanny. Given the surprising swerves and disorientations evoking Buñuel and Dalí, and the confidence in a poetic discourse recalling Eluard and Péret, one wonders if Ruiz didn’t elaborate his scenario using the Surrealist mode of automatic writing. Troubled, graceful Isidore – Ducasse and Duncan? – is a purely Surrealist heroine, part Ophelia, Salomé, Bérénice, prone to trances, somnambulism, hysterical seizure, contact with the ‘other side’.Read More »

Beynelmilel / International: Co-directed by Muharrem Gülmez and scriptwriter Sirri Süreyya Önder, Beynelmilel / International takes movie-goers to the days in the aftermath of the coup d’etat of September 12th, 1980. Here we are in a remote town of Adýyaman watching the tragicomical story of a group of local musicians. The film depicts the extent to which ordinary people were affected by the military suppression after the coup. It is a period movie made in an ironic and humorous manner. (Istanbul Film Festival booklet – 2007)

• IST.FF 2007 – The Special Prize of the Jury was awarded to “Beynelmilel / International”.
• IST FF 2007 – Best Actress Award was given to Özgü Namal for her performance in “Beynelmilel”.Read More »

SYNOPSIS
On the eve of the First World War, a wealthy count, Forbek, builds a rocco pleasure dome in the French countryside. He invites his wife and his friends to live a life of idyllic seclusion inside the dome. In 1982, the same dome is the venue for a teaching seminar attended by a number of teachers with some radical ideas for educating children. Both Forbek and the seminar’s organisers are striving for similar things, the creation of a better world. Both are doomed to failure…
taken from here
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A young girl’s life is turned upside down when her mother brings home a new boyfriend

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From the start, I knew the British director Andrea Arnold had captured something volatile and splendid in Fish Tank. A girl named Katie Jarvis plays 15-year-old Mia, who in the first shots stares out the window of a high-rise, working-class tenement in London’s East End — the window of a vacant flat where she practices her hip-hop moves to the sound of music from tiny speakers.Read More »

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The Forty-First, Boris Lavrenyev’s novella, written in only two days, has proven enduringly popular. It tells the story of a young woman snarpshooter fighting with the Reds in Turkestan. She misses her forty-first victim, a handsome White lieutenant, and ends up escorting him, by boat, into captivity across the Aral Sea. A storm, however, strands the two on an island. Sick with pneumonia, the lieutenant is nursed back to health by his Red escort, and the two fall in love. At the last, however, Mariutka shoots him dead when he tries to escape, thus making him “the forty-first.”
Sorok pervyy had been filmed as a silent, from the author’s own script, by Yakov Protazanov in 1927.Read More »

Synopsis
In La Goulette, a small harbour town in the Tunis suburbs, Youssef, the Muslim, Jojo, the Tunisian Jew, and Giuseppe, the Sicilian Catholic, are as inseparable as their three 16-year-old daughters, Meriem, Gigi and Tina. In a fit of provocation the three girls all swear that they’ll lose their virginity on the day of the feast of the Madonna, each with a boy from a religion different to hers ! Once this taboo is brought out into the open, all three families fall out. But the friendship between the three fathers is so strong that it reconciles them, closer than ever before… until the eve of the Israel-Arab Six Day War in 1967 that forces apart Jews and Arabs all over the world.Read More »