Drama

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Tinto Brass somewhat reigns in the more comic and explicit aspects of his brand of erotica for this well-made tale of a couple in post-war Italy trying to recapture the magic of their wartime romances with other lovers. Fred (blues musician Andy J. Forest, who did a handful of Italian movies in the late eighties), an American soldier now working for UNESCO assessing the state of Roman art after the war, reconnects with a prostitute Rosa (Francesca Dellera) while former British nurse Jennifer (Nicola Warren) waits apparently in vain to meet up with Ciro (Luigi Laezza), a waiter/pimp who pursued her years before. Jennifer’s part of the film is dominated by flashbacks and tormented narration as she professes her love for her absent Italian. Fred’s part of the film has he and Rosa on the road with his attempts to relive their whore-client dalliances complicated by Rosa’s wanting more from him.Read More »

Criterion Collection wrote:
Masaki Kobayashi’s mammoth humanist drama is one of the most staggering achievements of Japanese cinema. Originally filmed and released in three parts, the nine-and-a-half-hour The Human Condition (Ningen no joken), adapted from Junpei Gomikawa’s six-volume novel, tells of the journey of the well-intentioned yet naive Kaji (handsome Japanese superstar Tatsuya Nakadai) from labor camp supervisor to Imperial Army soldier to Soviet POW. Constantly trying to rise above a corrupt system, Kaji time and again finds his morals an impediment rather than an advantage. A raw indictment of its nation’s wartime mentality as well as a personal existential tragedy, Kobayashi’s riveting, gorgeously filmed epic is novelistic cinema at its best.Read More »

Clara Manni (Lucia Bosé, so good in Antonioni’s A Story of a Love Affair), a Milan shop girl, is discovered on the street and used for a bit part in a movie. That single part brings her immediate celebrity, and with the coaxing of her producer, Gianni, she becomes a screen sex symbol. She has great success in several sex comedy vehicles, but Gianni decides to push her into the world of the art film in order to attain artistic legitimacy and respect. She never wishes for this, since money is never an issue to her, but she is pushed head first into a production of Joan of Arc. The film is brutally attacked by the critics, and Clara’s dignity and identity are thrown into question in the harrowing final shot.Read More »

Description: Three friends face mid-life crises. Paul is a writer who’s blocked. François has lost his ideals and practices medicine for the money; his wife grows distant, even hostile. The charming Vincent, everyone’s favorite, faces bankruptcy, his mistress leaves him, and his wife, from whom he’s separated, wants a divorce. The strains on the men begin to show particularly in François and Paul’s friendship and in Vincent’s health. A younger man, Jack, becomes attractive to Lucie, François’s wife. Another young friend, the boxer Jean, who’s like a son to Vincent and whose girlfriend is pregnant, has taken a bout with a merciless slugger. Has happiness eluded this circle of friends?

Written by {jhailey}Read More »

Quote:
Adua and Friends (Italian: Adua e le compagne) is a 1960 Italian film directed by Antonio Pietrangeli with a collaborative screenplay by the film’s director together with Ruggero Maccari, Ettore Scola and Tullio Pinelli. The plot concerns the efforts of four prostitutes to eke out a living after being thrown out of their jobs by enactment of the Merlin Law, which shut down Italy’s legalized brothels.Read More »

Struggling martial artist and dancer Bruno loves his girlfriend Carla, but when he meets fellow dancer Rai, serious sparks begin to fly, opening the couple up to new possibilities. A new generation navigates sexual fluidity, torn affections, and open relationships in this steamy love triangle. But once Bruno’s clandestine encounters with Rai are revealed, a confused and hurt Carla kicks him out. But she simply doesn’t want to give up on her love. Eventually she agrees that Bruno can date them both as long as he keeps his life with Rai relatively separate. Read More »

Daniela, raised in the bosom of a strict Evangelical family and recently unmasked as a fornicator by her shocked parents, struggles to find her own path to spiritual harmony.Read More »

Synopsis
Alex, Lino and Liz, three sons of diplomats, live together in Brasilia enjoying the freedom inside an empty apartment with no parents, seemingly unaware of the world outside. Their lives change irrevocably when they meet ‘X’, a person with no name or past, who suggests taking the idea of living every day as it was the last one. For that to happen they form a new movement – THE CONCEPTION, having a revolutionary creed: Death to the ego, be a new character every day, lose your memories, abolish money, have excesses all the time. The world becomes a great theatre, the conceptualist is someone that makes up characters which last only 24 hours.Read More »

The film version of what is widely regarded as one of Nobel Prizewinner Harold Pinter’s greatest plays. Betrayal traces a seven year affair played out in reverse – from its poignant end to its illicit first kiss. This version is from it’s first British TV screening and is upped to celebrate 50 years of Harold Pinter plays. In 1958 Harold Pinter wrote the following:
“There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.” The film is little more than the stage play on celluloid and has great performances from Ben Kingsley, Patricia Hodge and Jeremy Irons. The silence after the opening credits is intentional.Read More »