Drama

This story opens in 1938 in Rome, where Marcello has just taken a job working for Mussollini and is courting a beautiful young woman who will make him even more of a conformist. Marcello is going to Paris on his honeymoon and his bosses have an assignment for him there. Look up an old professor who fled Italy when the fascists came into power. At the border of Italy and France, where Marcello and his bride have to change trains, his bosses give him a gun with a silencer. In a flashback to 1917, we learn why sex and violence are linked in Marcello’s mind. (IMDb)Read More »

From Stephen Holden review in NYT: “In his unsettling urban panorama, “The Town Is Quiet,” the director Robert Guédiguian invests the French port city of Marseille with the same epic sense of drama that infused Robert Altman’s “Nashville.” Raw, wrenching and more starkly tragic than Mr. Altman’s satire, “The Town Is Quiet” evokes a similar vision of a city as a teeming organism in violent, spasmodic flux.Read More »

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The premiere of the first part of Ulrich Seidls PARADISE trilogy was celebrated in this year’s competition of the Cannes Film Festival with great success. The film tells the story of Teresa (Margarethe Tiesel), a 50-year-old Austrian from Vienna who travels as a sex tourist to Kenya in search of love. On the beaches of Kenya they´re known as Sugar Mamas: European women to whom black beach boys offer sex to earn a living. The movie of Ulrich Seidl deals about older women and young men, the market value of sexuality, the power of skin color, Europe and Africa, and the exploited, who have no choice but to victimize other victims.

PARADISE: Love is the opener in a trilogy about three women in one family who take separate vacations: one as a sex tourist, another as a Catholic missionary (PARADISE: Faith) and the third at a diet camp for teenagers (PARADISE: Hope.) Three films, three women, three stories of longing.Read More »

Secret agent Casey Reed (Gene Barry) goes undercover as a smarmy lounge singer (replete with cheezy white jacket!) in Hong Kong to find a missing arab prince.

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Director Edward L. Cahn always knew how to make lemonade from a lemon; his B pictures of the late 1950s displayed a raw energy that many of his higher-budgeted films of the 1930s lacked. Hong Kong Confidential is a backlot cheapie starring Gene Barry and second-feature stalwarts Beverly Tyler and Allison Hayes. Barry plays a secret agent, in Hong Kong to rescue an Arabian prince from his kidnappers. The villains, of course, are Soviet spies, easily recognizable by their baggy suits and flabby accents. Also in the cast of Hong Kong Confidential is Ed Kemmer, who’d once starred in that baby-boomer favorite Space Patrol.Read More »

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A young man and woman have a sensual, one-night stand in a motel room where they confide in each other about their troubled lives.Read More »

Kairat, the first feature film from „Kazakh new wave“ film director Darezhan Omirbaev, tells the story of a young man from a village in Kazakh steppe and his initiation into life in the big city.

KAIRAT
Darezhan Omirbaev, Kazakhstan, 1991; 72m
“This 34-year-old filmmaker has invented an entire universe,” wrote Jean-Michel Frodon in Le Monde, and he was right. Darezhan Omirbaev may well have been inspired by Bresson and Hitchcock, but he has indeed created his very own universe in the five films he’s made since the late 80s. The disconnected events of his films are simple – a boy travelling on a train from the steppe to the city, riding on a bus, going to a movie and brushing bare arms with his date, wandering through a train yard. But every form, every movement, every gesture seems to have found its precise poetic place, and the emotional terrain contained within his first feature feels as vast as an ocean. Kairat is the name of Omirbaev’s autobiographically inspired hero, who moves through life exactly as many of us do when we’re adolescents – awkwardly, in bewildered confusion, guarding a wealth of emotions deep within us like a buried treasure. One of the best films of the 90s.Read More »

Amos Vogel in Film as a Subversive Art:
A censorship landmark case: the entire plot pivots on an act of intercourse, during which the woman accidentally discovers the vital clue to the film’s mystery. The complete absence of nudity and total relevance of the scene to the plot posed an impossible problem for the American censors, and led, upon appeals against its prohibition, to the abolition by the Supreme Court of the entire system of American state censorship in 1967. This development contributed significantly to the later era of sexual permissiveness in the American cinema.Read More »

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Smoke and Blue in the Face director Wayne Wang has made his name by making features (Slam Dance excepted) looking at ordinary Americans and revealing their slightly less than ordinary lives. In Dim Sum, he studies the cultural differences between assorted generations of Chinese Americans, a theme picked up again in Eat A Bowl of Tea and The Joy Luck Club. Here, in his home environment, Wang feels comfortable with his subjects and some charming observations about their lives are revealed in an understated but nevertheless engrossing little picture.

Focusing primarily on the subject of family traditions amongst San Franciscan Chinese and the responsibilities of children in caring for their ageing parents, Dim Sum follows the relationship between a very traditional Chinese woman in her 60s and her thirty-something daughter, the mother trying to marry the daughter off. The difference in attitudes between the two provide much of the humour, but there is a greater depth to the emotions as Wang seeks to reconcile his slight tale to the greater picture of the wane of oldfashioned Chinese beliefs.Read More »

Plot summary from IMDB:
Thirty-something Jonna, successful ad executive with cozy architect husband Niklas and two small children, leads a double life. She is constantly on the lookout for quick casual sex. When she starts seeing handsome and rich young yacht owner Aleksi, things really start going awry in her personal and professional life. While her artist sister Sanna provides her with suitable alibis, TV sex therapist Nora tries to help her come to terms with her sex addiction.Read More »