Athos Magnani, a young researcher, returns to Tara, where his father was killed before his birth, at the request of Draifa. The father, also named Athos Magnani and looking exactly like the son, was killed by a fascist in 1936 — or so says Draifa (his mistress), the town statue, and everyone in town. As the son untangles the web of lies this story is constructed from, he finds himself ensnared in the same web.Read More »
At a slickly run massage centre in Nanjing, sight-impaired massuers and masseuses are employed in a wonderful environment that’s an oasis outside of mainstream society.Read More »
Towards the end of the 1920s, Emma Eckhert has become one of the most talked about women in France. Not only is she stunningly beautiful and a staunch supporter of moral campaigns, she is also a hugely successful banker. Having made a fortune speculating on the stock exchange, she intends to share her wealth with her investors, offering them a far higher rate of interest than her competitors. Needless to say, the traditional bankers regard her as a dangerous threat and conspire to bring about her downfall…Read More »
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All Delia has ever wanted was to be a wife and mother. She lives in Rome in the late 1940s – a city divided between the positive thrust of liberation and the miseries of the war that has just ended – with her husband, Ivano, and their three children. Ivano may be a harsh master; his father even more…Read More »
After firing a colleague, the head of a PR company begins to question her lifestyle and values.Read More »
Fred is a generous guy .He gives all his savings to the needy:but saints are a nuisance to live with at home ,and in the world we live in,it takes a lot of faith and a total commitment to succeed;no compromise is possible:his wife can’t go on living like that and his boss fires him.He could take to the road ,but he does not have faith.So he turns into a modern Robin Hood ,stealing from the rich and giving to the poor ; with his new girlfriend, they become idealized Bonnie and Clyde. Maguette,the mysterious black man they meet along the way, brings his strange wisdom;he tries to deal with the golden rules of society ,just to prove how absurd they may be: a royal heir in his native Africa,he can turn into a lawyer or into a chief inspector of schools.Read More »
Jacob, a man who believes he is a wolf trapped in a human body, is sent to a clinic by his family where he is forced to undergo increasingly extreme forms of “curative” therapies at the hands of The Zookeeper. Jacob’s only solace is the enigmatic wildcat with whom he roams the hospital in the dead of night. The two form an improbable friendship that develops into infatuation.Read More »
After a catastrophe that modified the world’s natural state and destroyed civilized society, a couple begins a new life in a shelter. Their relationship is disturbed by the arrival of a woman.
The critical success in France of How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman made possible dos Santos’ delirious science-fiction vision of free love in a post-apocalyptic wilderness besieged by flesh hungry zombies contaminated by an unnamed nuclear attack. Who is Beta? follows two statuesque survivors drawn irresistibly together only to be entranced by the arrival and sudden disappearance of a third, the bewitching raven haired Beta. With its cartoon-like depiction of extreme violence and desire, Who is Beta? offers a heady Pop-infused companion to Hunger for Love. Yet beneath its giddy play of surfaces, dos Santos’ underappreciated film gradually reveals a darkly ambiguous metaphoric dimension. (Harvard Film Archive)Read More »
Bursting with the ideas of a who’s-who of the Central European avant-garde, this eye-opening rediscovery is the missing link between Buñuel and Vertov, the Surrealists and the Soviets. Modernist novelist Vladislav Vancura joined forces with the famed Surrealist poet Vitezslav Nezval and the founder of structuralism, Roman Jakobson, to channel their movements’ missions into one superbly energetic film loosely structured around two children caught between their variously incompetent parents and an experimental reform school (“Education by Freedom!”). Vancura unleashes a dizzying storm of competing ideas and aesthetics, mashing up genres and accepted narrative norms to subvert the framework of conventional cinema, and, by extension, society. Anchoring the film’s dizzying camera angles and bizarre vignettes is some pointed commentary, as witnessed in the excesses of the Jazz Age bourgeoisie and the struggles of the Great Depression. On the Sunny Side pulsates with an energy that’s still ahead of its time.Read More »