Drama

KONTROBERSYAL is one of the classic masterpieces of acclaimed stage and film director, Lino Brocka, in the historical period of the 80’s. A story set in the glitter and glamour of showbiz world. Behind the bright lights, fabulous costumes and larger-than-life sets, real lives are broken and shattered for the hunger for fame and the thirst for money. Karina Daluz (played by Gina Alajar) was blinded by the ill promise of success offered by her producer Mers Madsen (played by Charo Santos). Her walk toward the path to stardom entailed her sanity and corrupted her soul. Her innocence was replaced by wickedness and her once good-natured self, has become the demon that she feared. No love that is forever, no hope to discover for all the people living in KONTROBERSYAL.Read More »

Producer/director D.W. Griffith’s feature is a fairly realistic study of the deprivations visited on the German people after their defeat in World War I. In her best-ever performance, Griffith protégée Carol Dempster plays Inga, who does her best to hold her family together and keep food on the table despite grinding poverty, debilitating illness and out-of-control inflation. The most memorable scene finds Inga desperately trying to maneuver a basketful of near-worthless Deutschmarks to a market before the prices rise again and she is unable to buy meat. Aware that anti-German sentiment still prevailed in the US, Griffith cannily inserted an opening title which noted that the main characters were Polish.Read More »

from Mubi:
After receiving anonymous love letters for the past 10 years, widower Arcadio decides to find out who the mysterious author is. His brother Mariano thinks the search is ridiculous, but Arcadio’s niece Skip is willing to help.Read More »

Tokoku Kitamura (1868-1894) is a Romantic poet and an advocate of liberalism in the Meiji era. This biopic is centered on New Year’s Day of 1894, when Kitamura is recovering from a suicide attempt. Japan is then under the spell of fervent patriotism because the government wants to build up public support for a war with China. Kitamura’s literary friends and militant comrades come to visit. They wonder why Kitamura wants to kill himself. Kitamura at first refuses to receive them, then he sits down with them and looks back on his days as a civil rights militant, his stormy love life and his ardent but destructive desire to live literature to the full.Read More »

Synopsis:
Inside an apartment, a young woman suffers from widespread distress. She lives alone in an attic with a skylight in the ceiling that is her only contact with the outside of Paris.Read More »

A lonely woman recalls her first love thirteen years prior during a brief summer vacation.Read More »

Synopsis:
Pierre, a young man of privilege, whose anonymously-published novel is a hit and who’s about to marry his blond cousin, Lucie, abandons all when a dark-haired vagrant tells him her secret late one night in the woods: that she is Isabelle, his sister, abandoned by their father. Pierre breaks off with Lucie and his doting mother, heading for Paris with Isabelle, intent on knowing the dark side of human nature. He begins a novel, sending chapters under a pseudonym to his publisher; his relationship with Isabelle moves beyond the fraternal; and, in winter, the frail Lucie comes to live with them. Family jealousies mount, and Pierre may have discovered despair instead of the truth.Read More »

The international cinematic new wave came bursting into the Swiss cinema through the work of Michel Soutter, whose La lune avec les dents (The Moon with Teeth) became practically a manifesto of the movement. Michel Soutter was one of the first directors of New Swiss Cinema who has made fiction films and he cofounded the Groupe 5 with Tanner and Goretta. The film follows William, thirty-ish, out of work and looking for a new life after apparently having been thrown out of his previous one. He meets up with Noelle, who seems intrigued by his restlessness – until her economist boyfriend shows up. Yet plot details do little to convey the power of the film, which lay in its capturing the anarchic texture of William’s life – a life whose lack of direction was read as a rebuke of the Swiss myth of orderliness and self-satisfaction.Read More »

A rather disturbed young woman, who calls herself Jackie-O (Parker Posey), and pretends her brother, Marty, (Josh Hamilton) is JFK, is at home with mother (Geneviève Bujold) at their stately home, along with her two brothers, and Marty’s new fiancee, Lesly (Tori Spelling.)

What family secrets will we discover? How will Lesly react to her fiancee’s most unusual family? Are there yet darker secrets? Is their rather unconventional behavior contagious?

This absurd comedy has been a delight for many. I hope you enjoy it!Read More »