Drama

Alan Clarke’s 1975 Playhouse drama Diane is a deeply bleak and unsettling account of incest between a father (Frank Mills) and his daughter, the titular character played by that great character actress Janine Duvitski in her TV debut.Read More »

The Cinema of Soviet Kazakhstan 1925–1991: An Uneasy Legacy
Quote:
Razluchnitsa is, first and foremost, a two-faceted love story: about the love between men and women, and about the love between siblings. The violent removal of the one person who disturbs the peace in the brothers’ home seems to happen with the quiet approval of both Adil and Rustem. This gives the story, which for two-thirds of the film resembles a late 1950s’ French nouvelle vague picture, an unexpected edge. Even the title appears in a paradoxical light: normally, the word “razluchnitsa” refers to a woman who is loved by a married man who then leaves his wife and family to be with her (the English translation is “homewrecker”). Read More »

Humble, unassuming Ma and timid Cao have been cast off by their families and forced into an arranged marriage. They have to combine their strength and build a home to survive. In the face of much adversity, an unexpected bond begins to blossom, as both Ma and Cao, uniting with Earth’s cycles, create a haven for themselves in which they can thrive.Read More »

A tower block on the edge of a forest, people hoping to join the building’s community as it is one of the last bastions of civilization in a world that has fallen apart.Read More »

Quote:
When Harry (Anthony Edwards, Zodiac, ER) meets Julie (Mare Winningham, Turner & Hooch) at the La Brea Tar Pits, it’s love at first sight. But when Harry’s alarm clock fails to go off, he misses their scheduled date by several hours. Alone on a street corner at four in the morning, he answers a ringing pay phone and picks up a garbled message that all-out nuclear war is set to begin in an hour’s time. With the clock ticking and the city spiralling into chaos, can Harry somehow track down Julie and get them both to safety before Armageddon?Read More »

The current wave of kidnappings in Latin America inspired this tense suspense drama. Martin (Jean Paul Leroux) and Carla (Mía Maestro) are a wealthy young couple who, after a night of club hopping, head back to their car to go home. However, three kidnappers — Bubu (Pedro Perez), Niga (Carlos Madera), and Trece (Carlos Julio Molina) — are waiting for them; seeing how free they are with their money, the men figure that Martin and Carla should fetch a decent ransom for their release. The kidnappers demand 20,000 dollars to set Martin and Carla free, and Carla’s father (Rubén Blades) struggles to raise the cash, with the criminals insisting upon payment in a mere two hours.Read More »

Depiction of the everyday life of a teenage heroin addict.

Christine is a pasty-faced teen in a windbreaker and ill-fitting striped shirt who walks endlessly from one peer-aged client to another during the deserted daytime of the suburbs.Read More »

The Clouded Yellow stars Trevor Howard as David Sommers, a former member of the British Secret Service. After the war, Sommers takes a low-profile job cataloguing butterfly specimens. While thus employed, he make the acquaintance of Sophie Malraux (Jean Simmons), a curious young lady who seems to be hiding something. Indeed she is, as Sommers discovers when Sophie is brought up on murder charges. Championing her cause, Sommers helps Sophie escape, prompting Scotland Yard to put another ex-secret agent on the couple’s trail. The chase extends from London to Liverpool, culminating in a tangled web of murder and madness. The Clouded Yellow was the first independent production supervised by Betty E. Box.Read More »

A wartime melodrama shot through with the folkloric magic and vivid imagination that defined Ukraine’s so-called “poetic cinema” of the 1960s. In the dark days of Nazi occupation, a young girl native to the Carpathian mountains falls in love with a wounded Soviet partisan. Their affair sets in motion a tragic chain of events, as her family turns against her with shocking results. Borys Ivchenko’s roving camera and the striking performances of Lyubov Rumyantseva, Grigore Grigoriu, and Ukrainian screen icon Ivan Mykolaichuk make this an classic of Ukrainian cinema.Read More »