A young farmer can no longer cope with the strong competition of the big agricultural organisations. When he has to declare his bankruptcy, his girlfriend leaves him and his best friend commits suicide. Then, when a meteorite batters his barn, he can’t stand the situation anymore. He loads his last pig and his shotgun into the sidecar of his motorcycle and travels as an idealistic rebel across the country.Read More »
Frank and Eleanor Perry’s heartbreaking feature adaptation of three Truman Capote stories, produced in collaboration with Capote himself. The stories all center around the relationship between two slightly odd, outcast characters, and they all hover around the idea of loss — but each winds up in a starkly different place, perhaps even in a different genre. Magnificently written, acted, and directed – an absolute shame that it’s not better known.Read More »
Official Selection, 2019 Venice Film Festival
RESTORED IN 2019 BY THE NEW ZEALAND FILM COMMISSION
There’s a lot of watching in Merata Mita’s landmark MAURI. It’s the 1950s and there’s a storm coming to a once-thriving Maori settlement. Rewi, holding on to an unsettled past, watches the woman he loves (and who loves him back) slip into the arms of a white man. Kara, the town’s elder matriarch, is stirred by the change in the air, of birthrights trembling and a land falling captive. And then there’s Awatea, a young girl standing watch from the circumference of this simmering circle, staring not out of tragedy but of awe, at a Maori life-force re-shuffling off the rippling coasts of the North Island.Read More »
Synopsis:
In this slow-starting but effective drama, comedian Alberto Sordi changes hats to play Silvio Magnozzi, a man so dedicated to his high moral standards that he loses out on most of the things he wants in life -including his wife. He watches while others march up the ladder of success way ahead of him, sometimes by hypocritically licking the boots of their superiors or doing just anything at all to attain advancement. After his death grip on his principles causes his wife to walk out, Silvio relents and starts to live like others. Now he is supposedly happily residing on Easy Street, his wife is back — and so what is bugging him?
~ Eleanor MannikkaRead More »
A Scottish orchid farmer visiting her ill sister in Bogota, Colombia, befriends a young musician and a French archaeologist in charge of monitoring a century-long construction project to tunnel through the Andes mountain range. Each night, she is bothered by increasingly loud bangs which prevent her from getting any sleep.Read More »
This was Ford’s 46th film in 5 years. The film seems to be overly melodramatic, a young man in a wheelchair drags himself (in pouring rain) to the house of the man who stole money from the church donation drive. There’s also a woman walking through the rain who gets struck by lightning, a whipping, a fist fight or two, a wedding, an operation?Read More »
Dramatisation of the investigation into the murder in prison in 1954 of Gaspare Pisciotta, gangster and lieutenant of the bandit Salvatore Giuliano.Read More »
Synopsis:
Country girl Fereshteh and city girl Roya, schoolmates at Tehran University in the early ’80s, become fri ends when the former tutors the latter to pay her way through architectural school. Their friendship and innocent f un are clouded only by the presence of a young man who stalks the pretty Fereshteh, demanding she marry him. She br ushes him off and the girls feel strong enough to disregard his advances, until one day he throws a bottle of acid a t Fereshteh’s cousin, mistaking him for her boyfriend. Blaming her for brining disgrace onto the family, Fereshteh’ s father forces her to return home from university, which has been closed due to the turmoil following the Islamic r evolution anyway.Read More »
Two teenage girls in a small Chinese fishing town vow to become sisters no matter what. When one becomes happily married to a stranger, the other is cruelly betrothed to the abusive son of a wealthy family. Seeking to free herself from a lifetime of abuse, Hui-hua desperately looks for a way out.Read More »