Gripping, tense and dark the whole duration through, Angel of Mine concludes with an excellent ending, as desperation to be a mother results in a very surprising conclusion. It is astonishing that the film has been based on real life events.Read More »
The spirit, hopes, and failures of a troupe of itinerant performers in the 1950s create a poignant, humorous leitmotif in this drama by Fernando Fernan-Gomez. The story of the wandering players is told in flashbacks, as Carlos Galvan (Jose M. Sacristan) reminisces about the good times while under therapy with a psychiatrist in a senior citizens’ home. Carlos and his lover Juanita (Laura del Sol), his teenage son, his father, and a few other actors try to eke out a living by putting on shows in small towns and villages. No one has very much money, but life is lived to the hilt, and Carlos himself has some pretty tall tales.Read More »
A Western couple (played by Melissa Leo and James Wilby) working in Pakistan visit an unconventional holy shrine to harness its spiritual powers to help them conceive a child. They are lavished with the attentions of the shrine’s leader (an exceptional performance from Zia Mohyeddin – Lawrence of Arabia, Khartoum) and her followers, but their methods and motives are not all that they seem, and the couple’s lives are plunged into darkness.
This ravishing, unsettling film from director Jamil Dehlavi (The Blood of Hussain, Born of Fire) is a deeply personal work which raises questions of cultural and sexual identity, religious fanaticism and the abuses of power. The brand-new 2K restoration from the original negative was supervised and approved by Dehlavi and cinematographer Nic Knowland.Read More »
Ana is 28. She feels useful and satisfied in her routine work helping others. Nevertheless, outside of her working day, Ana has serious problems relating to people. She is socially awkward and even aggressive towards those people closest to her and whom she loves.
Ana can’t control this behaviour or her emotions, so she suffers constantly and feels tormented and guilty. Really she would just like to feel at ease with herself and with others, to be happy. But her self-destructive, self-harming behaviour only isolates her more and more.
Ana is unaware that she suffers from what psychiatrists call Borderline Personality Disorder.Read More »
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In an early episode in Carmen, Carlos Saura’s second dance film with renowned flamenco artist Antonio Gades (in what would inevitably prove to be the second film of their collaborative Flamenco trilogy), a group of musicians rehearse at a large, open dance studio within earshot of the choreographer, Antonio (Gades) as he struggles to find the proper tempo suitable to adapting the Seguedilla from Bizet’s opera for a flamenco performance. Reinterpreting the operatic work from a waltzy, 3/4 timed vocal piece to a sprightly, improvisational bulería, the musicians perform their rendition to the receptive Antonio who, along with his studio partner – and perhaps, erstwhile paramour – Cristina (Cristina Hoyos), begin to re-envision Carmen, not as a French composer’s projection of the fiery gypsy seductress – and more broadly, a foreigner’s stereotypical notions of Spanish culture – but rather, as an indigenous adaptation of Prosper Mérimée’s novel, disconnected from the now iconic flourishes of Bizet’s opera. Read More »
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In And the Ship Sails On, I needed a large exterior to paint, so I used the wall of the Pantanella pasta factory. It was where my father, Urbano Fellini, had worked when he passed through Rome on his way back from forced labor in Belgium after World War I. It was while at the pasta factory in 1918 that he met my mother, Ida Barbiani, and carried her off, not on a white charger, but in a third-class coach on the train, with her full consent, away from her home, family, and social class in Rome.Read More »
The mysterious death of an enigmatic young man newly arrived in the suburb of Wetherby releases the long-repressed, dark passions of some of its residents.Read More »
A successful black woman discovers that her birth mother is a underprivileged white woman, but the woman denies it. As emotions run high, everyone’s secrets are exposed.Read More »
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Anne has a very active imagination, only natural for a writer. But in her mid-thirties, she still knows practically nothing of her own family’s past. After her mother’s death, Anne discovers old photos and letters that convince her to take a closer look at the life of her parents, Michael and Léna. The young couple met in the concentration camps during World War II, later moving to France to start their new life together. Soon, Anne’s research into their Jewish history and their ties to Lyon’s communist party reveals the existence of a mysterious uncle, Jean, whom everyone seems intent on forgetting entirely. As she gradually closes in on the discovery she didn’t know she was looking for, her father grows ever more ill, and may take the secret that kept them apart for so long to his grave. In a journey that stretches from post-war France to the 1980s, Anne’s destiny intertwines with her father’s past until they form a single, unforgettable story.Read More »