Drama

Inspired by “Les Bonnes”, Jean Genet’s play (itself based on the true story of the Papin sisters), adapted by Jean Vauthier (a writer and avant-garde playwright, which is probably why the dialogue is so theatrical. He died in 92 but he was born in 1910 so his centennial was this year, but he is totally forgotten) and by an uncredited Louis Jouvet (according to imdb)
André Malraux, then Minister of Culture (yes, there was, still is, such a Minister in France) wanted the movie to the Cannes Festival. The followers of the Surrealism movement took the Papin sisters case as paradigm of class revolt, and a signal that a social revolution was already taking place. Romantics saw in these grisly murders the emergence of absolute Evil, like Lautréamont in `Les Chants de Maldoror’. Philosophers engaged in the socialist movement wrote passionate texts in defence of those maids, like Jean-Paul Sartre in `Le Mur’, and Simone de Beauvoir in `La Force de l’âge’. Jacques Lacan, in `Écrits’, will develop his first scientific essay on psychoanalysis, following the Papin criminal case. (imdb’s only user comment)Read More »

Synopsis
A nurse, a paramedic, a gymnast and her coach have formed a service for hire.
They stand in for dead people by appointment, hired by the relatives, friends or colleagues of the deceased. The company is called Alps.
Their leader, the paramedic, calls himself Mont Blanc. Although Alps members operate under a discipline regime demanded by their leader, the nurse does not.
alpsfilm.grRead More »

From imdb:

The film is set in St. Petersburg, Russia after the Russian revolution of 1917. Based on the eponymous book by Boris Lavrenev. Maj. General Yevgeni Pavlovich Adamov (Popov) was a lawyer in the Tzar\’s Army and a professor of law at the Military Academy before the Russian Revolution. In the fall of 1918 he was arrested on false accusations and suffered the loss of all his property and honors. During the turbulent times of Revolution he managed to use all his experience and professionalism to prove his innocence. He was released from prison and all charges against him were dropped. He became a free man, but the reality is changed, and his adaptation to the post-revolutionary life was not easy. Written by Steve Shelokhonov

The film is based on a novel by Boris Lavrenev.Read More »

Summary :
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This X rated feature finds a young and sexually inexperienced woman
arriving home from boarding school to find her mother having sex
with a man. Traumatized, she flees the scene and ends up in a
hippie coffee house. She smokes hashish, engages in lesbianism and
has sex with a black American medical student. Exotic dancers,
Hell’s Angels and other colorful characters are included in the young girls sexual awakening.
Read More »

In 1942, Rommel halts his victorious Afrika Korps and sends German agent John Eppler
and radio operator Sandy to Cairo. Their mission is to learn where the British plan to
launch their counteroffensive. Eppler immediately communicates with Amina, an Egyptian
cabaret dancer and his former mistress, who agrees to help him. Unknown to them,
British counterespionage chief Captain Robertson has learned of Eppler’s presence in
Cairo and is working with the leader of Cairo’s Jewish underground, Radek. Amina lures
an ineffectual British officer, Major Wilson, to her houseboat and has him drugged and
robbed of his briefcase containing British counteroffensive details. While Eppler and
Sandy relay the information to Rommel that the battle will take place at Alam Halfa,
Yvette, a member of the Jewish underground, sneaks aboard the boat and revives the
unconscious Wilson. They are interrupted by Amina, who shoots Wilson but is herself
stabbed to death by Yvette. Eppler arrives and is about to kill Yvette when Robertson
and Radek appear and arrest Eppler. Eppler’s satisfaction at having already informed
Rommel that the counteroffensive will take place at Alam Halfa is short-lived. Robertson
had seen to it that the plans in Wilson’s briefcase were false–the real battle will take
place at El Alamein.Read More »

In 1951, two years after the “scandal” of the Fiamma che non si spegne, Cottafavi got the opportunity to work on a film with a small production company, Novissima Film. With little means, a number of technical and financial problems and working Sundays with the pieces of film given to him bit by bit, Cottafavi shot Una donna ha ucciso, a minor film that marked his comeback to directing. Followed by Traviata ’53 (1953), In amore si pecca in due (1953), Nel gorgo del peccato (1954) and Una donna libera (1954), Una donna ha ucciso was also the first of a pentalogy of melodramatic movies about the condition of women in contemporary society and the moral and social problems related to it. The film is based on a real crime story that took place immediately after the war. An Italian woman killed her English wartime lover for the sake of love. The story was reformulated by Cottafavi with the help of Siro Angeli and Giorgio Capitani. It was the producer who had the idea to make it a film; in fact, he had just gotten the rights to the autobiography of this woman who had been recently pardoned and released from jail. They planned to exploit the melodramatic and passionate elements of the story at a time when, for example, Raffaello Matarazzo’s films were enjoying enormous success. Gianni RondolinoRead More »

Quote:
The study of a youth on the edge of adulthood and his aunt, ten years older. Fabrizio is passionate, idealistic, influenced by Cesare, a teacher and Marxist, engaged to the lovely but bourgeois Clelia, and stung by the drowning of his mercurial friend Agostino, a possible suicide. Gina is herself a bundle of nervous energy, alternately sweet, seductive, poetic, distracted, and unhinged. They begin a love affair after Agostino’s funeral, then Gina confuses Fabrizio by sleeping with a stranger. Their visits to Cesare and then to Puck, one of Gina’s older friends, a landowner losing his land, dramatize contrasting images of Italy’s future. Their own futures are bleak.Read More »

Based on the 1836 novel by Balzac (wiki)

Quote:
Script-writers who adapt Balzac or Dostoievsky excuse the idiotic transformations they impose on the works from which they construct their scenarios by pleading that the cinema is incapable of rendering every psychological or metaphysical overtone. In their hands, Balzac becomes a collection of engravings in which fashion has the most important place, and Dostoievsky suddenly begins to resemble the novels of Joseph Kessel, with Russian-style drinking-bouts in night-clubs and troika races in the snow. Well, the only cause of these compressions is laziness and lack of imagination. The cinema of today is capable of expressing any kind of reality. What interests us is the creation of this new language. (…) The fundamental problem of the cinema is how to express thought.
Alexandre Astruc, The Birth of a New Avant-Barde: La Camera-Stylo (1948)Read More »

June 11th 1967, the Six-Day War is over and the cease fire has just begun. We follow the journey of Gassan and Haled, two Egyptian soldiers whose only wish is to make their way through the Sinai desert and safely reach the Suez Canal. Thus begins a comical, almost surrealistic saga during which they meet various groups of people across the desert, including Israeli soldiers on patrol and a pushy news reporter.Read More »