A classic tale of bravery and courage during WWII, Odette tells the true story of female war hero Odette Hallowes. After volunteering her services to the Special Operations Executive, Odette is despatched into Nazi occupied France and thrown into an intense world of espionage.Read More »
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Films that explore mental illness, especially Hollywood productions such as The Snake Pit, The Three Faces of Eve and A Brilliant Mind, usually tend to be heavy on the histrionics providing highly dramatic showcases and Oscar award opportunities for actors. But a descent into madness isn’t always signaled by wildly disruptive or overwrought behavior from the afflicted. Sometimes the illness can creep up slowly by degrees and pass for something more fleeting and subtle that avoids detection during the early stages. Life Upside Down (La vie à l’envers), directed by Alain Jessua, is a remarkable example of this, presenting a man who goes quietly mad while interpreting his erratic behavior as a profound new self-awareness.Read More »
A teenager resorts to desperate measures in her efforts to quit her school’s aerobic dance team and assert her independence.Read More »
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A British scientist is discovered to have been passing information to the Communists, then kills himself. Another scientist, Dr. Henry Laidlaw Longman (Sir Dirk Bogarde) decides that they might have brainwashed him by a sensory deprivation technique, but he doesn’t know if someone really can be convinced to act against their strongest feelings. So he agrees to be the subject in an experiment in which others will try to make him stop loving his wife Oonagh (Mary Ure).Read More »
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During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the normal routines of a rural elementary school are thrown into a panic when the civil defense alarm sirens go off, warning them of an imminent nuclear attack. The children are separated into groups, with one teacher leading each squad. Mrs. Andrews, the 6th grade teacher with a slowly building sense of doom, leads her group of students through the countryside to one of the children’s family’s bomb shelter. When they arrive at the shelter, they divide the rations and assume various duties, not knowing if they are in the middle of a nuclear holocaust—or if it was a false alarm.Read More »
In this comedy drama, two lovers go on vacation to the fellow’s summer home in southern France. Once there, the woman becomes quite jealous because she knows that many women have been at this house with him. She herself is not as experienced as he and secretly dreams of having many different lovers. Time passes and things become increasingly tense between them and they begin verbally attacking each other. Finally they make peace and love.Read More »
Describes the life of homeless people who form a community in the center of modern-day Moscow. It relates the story of six couples who love each other and try to remain together despite the poverty and despair of their existence.Read More »
Tradition versus industrialism.
The world of The Last Ones is set in a small mining village, in the Lapland tundra, filled with tensions between local reindeer herders and miners.
The struggling mine owner, nicknamed The Fisherman, supplies his workers with drugs so they’ll forget a tough existence. The nearby small community of reindeer breeders also struggles.
This critique of capitalism unfolds against a Western like landscape, as the film raises questions about the use and worth of the Arctic lands. The story also tackles romantic conflicts and northern melancholy with a touch of dark humor.
According to director Õunpuu, The Last Ones aims to depict an image of the current state of the world.Read More »
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A little-known French romantic drama from the early ’90s that seems to have achieved a little notoriety for a couple of explicit, seemingly unsimulated sex scenes. Here’s the review I wrote for the film on imdb (still the only one there!) when I was a teenager:
When I found this film on an old VHS at the university film library, I didn’t know what to expect. I had never heard of the director, never heard of any of the actors, indeed, never heard of the film.Read More »