Mariko Okada (in her film debut) plays a young ballerina prodigy whose parents seem to be trapped in a loveless marriage. The mother has been seeing a family friend for 20 years, but it’s obvious that they feel more than just friendship for each other, causing suspicion and unease with her son. The father throws himself into work, until one day, it all boils over… naruse-style.Read More »
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Miser Ebenezer Scrooge hates Christmas, but then gets a visit from his companion Jacob Marley, who has been dead for seven years. He urges Scrooge to change his life.Read More »
Jerry Donovan is just an ordinary American, who loves his family but takes his freedoms for granted. He goes to sleep, and finds himself in an alternate universe in which everyone refers to everyone else as “comrade.” And we know what that means—Jerry and his kind are denounced as “an ugly remnant of a diseased bourgeois class,” all the churches have been shuttered, and there’s a Soviet-style interrogation, much like the one in The Great Rights. Extra special kudos to Robert Conrad, who appears briefly as a factory comrade seeing to it that Jerry meets quota.Read More »
A lavish two-part costume tragedy based on the classic The Dowerless Girl by the nineteenth-century playwright Alexander Ostrovsky, A Cruel Romance (also known as Ruthless Romance) was the biggest Soviet box-office hit of 1984, though it seems to have had little international exposure until now.
It marked a change of direction for the veteran Eldar Ryazanov, who up to then had tended to specialise in contemporary comedy, though it seems to have done his career little harm: he was made a People’s Artist of the Soviet Union that year – and no wonder, quite apart from the film’s commercial success, its mostly wart-ridden portrait of the venal, money-grubbing bourgeoisie of the then-discredited Tsarist era must have gone down a storm with the Soviet authorities.Read More »
A turbulent and intriguing love story between two parking officers in the city of Los Angeles.Read More »
Plot: Hans Muller is a Jewish refugee from Germany. Relocating to Israel after World War II, he can not overcome the psychological effects of the war. After attacking a policeman, Hans becomes a fugitive, traveling through Israel with a teenage boy.Read More »
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Husseyin (Parviz Sayyad), Turkish migrant workers, working in a factory in West Germany. Every day after work, he goes to his home with local subway, where he lives with workers from his country in a residential complex. They are not able to communicate with people and their environment, the have a monotonous life and time of sorrow. one days, Husseyin Roomate , who is tired of his situation, left the complex because of back to his country ….Read More »
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In their graduation year, the disaffected students turn their concrete box of a school into a backdrop against which to create their own version of society. The newly elected boss Kujo (played with cool panache by rising star Ryuhei Matsuda) disdains all the rules, including those that have led to his election. Into this power vacuum, his scandalized friend and lieutenant Aoki (Hirofumi Arai) enters with vicious intent. As graduation looms, the pupils study violence and death.Read More »
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Kanjaki, a middle-aged man, goes to a quiet countryside village. He puts his helmet on a shrunken old woman whom he meets by chance in a shop. As soon as he presses the buttons on the helmet one by one, she suddenly remembers forgotten happy moments and is rejuvenated. This is just the beginning. Kanjaki goes on to make the village people recall their happy pasts, but his face is lined with worry and a sadness that deepens. What is the secret of this helmet? And what is he trying to do with it? Director Sabu’s Happiness suggests happiness and suffering are intertwined through the unusual scenario of a helmet reminding people of the happiest moments of their lives. Sabu convincingly portrays the notion that memory is the source of both happiness and suffering, and how memory affects our lives.Read More »