Reiko, who tolerates abuse in her marriage to a man 23 years her senior, is friends with Mayumi, a beautiful widow. Reiko meets her husband’s business rival, a young, capable businessman, and falls for him. Meanwhile, Mayumi enters into a relationship with Shimotsuma, a friend of her late husband.Read More »
Reiko, who tolerates abuse in her marriage to a man 23 years her senior, is friends with Mayumi, a beautiful widow. Reiko meets her husband’s business rival, a young, capable businessman, and falls for him. Meanwhile, Mayumi enters into a relationship with Shimotsuma, a friend of her late husband.Read More »
The 1968 Czechoslovakian film All My Good Countrymen (Všichni dobrí rodáci) is a tremendous piece of cinema. It’s the kind of picture one watches on several occasions across a lifetime, both to better understand what it has to say and also to feel more attuned to the culture and history it represents. The film feels epic in scope, despite coming in at under two hours in length, and this is largely because of its focus on a single setting across a dozen or so years, with numerous wonderful and ugly things happening in the interim. Director Vojtech Jasný also wrote it, putting in a decade’s worth of work to make what would become his signature film. It would be the last feature he’d get to direct in his home country for decades, as Jasný was effectively banned from filmmaking as a result.Read More »
Review from Bloomsbury Foreign Film Guide by Ronald Bergan and Robyn Karney:
Three generations of a family – grandfather, father, grandson – are obsessed with swimming. This passion destroys the first two, while the middle-aged surviving member tries to keep it at bay.
Made in Georgia, this is an original piece of work, constructed as a film within a film, and shot asdistinct segments intercut with the activities of the crew which is supposed to be making it. Grandfather’s tale is photographed in sepia, intriguingly beautiful and lyrical; son’s episode is black and white, and redolent with the atmosphere of the postwar Stalinist period; grandson’s story takes place on the contemporary film set and is in colour. There is little dialogue, voice-over commentary being largely used, and it is difficult to appreciate why the film’s release was withheld for a few years. An interesting, often absorbing curiosity, that falls apart in the third segment.Read More »
Al and Elsa have been a couple for some time, but the chances that their relationship will be long-lived are few. For one thing, Al is appallingly dependent on Elsa for his every emotional need. For another, Elsa is an incredibly elusive person, extremely difficult to pin down about anything – especially whatever is bothering her. How they have managed to survive this long is a cause for wonder. When Al gets an opportunity to be cast in a movie role, complete with no-cost occupancy in the casting agent’s ugly but fashionable apartment, he jumps at the chance to provide a little material satisfaction for his beloved Elsa. But what exactly does she want?Read More »
Wealthy Sunny von Bülow lies brain-dead, husband Claus guilty of attempted murder; but he says he’s innocent and hires Alan Dershowitz for his appeal.
Letterboxd review by chavel ★★★★★
An aerial shot that opens is like no other, it starts overlooking over the exclusive Easton Bay and then turns upwards, with the shot swooping over estate after estate in ritzy Rhode Island for nearly a minute. In an overhead shot, these are the richest looking houses you’ve ever seen, property after property, perfectly, lushly landscaped.Read More »
Quote:
Nicholas has long known he is different, that there is something shameful and unacceptable in him that must stay hidden, denied even. But South Africa’s minority government are embroiled in conflict at the Angolian border and all white young men over 16 must serve two years of compulsory military service to defend the Apartheid regime and its culture of toxic racist machismo. The ‘black danger’ is the real and present threat; what is wrong with Nicholas and others like him can be rooted out, treated and cured like a cancer. But just when fear pushes Nicholas to accept unspeakable horrors in the hopes of staying invisible, a tender relationship with another recruit becomes as dangerous for them both as any enemy fire.Read More »
Synopsis:
A young woman is taken hostage by a police officer and subsequently abused by the lawman gone mad.
Review:
The term Cargo 200 refers to the bodies of USSR soldiers brought home from Afghanistan in the 1980s, but in Aleksei Balabanov’s film of the same name every character seems destined to become Cargo 200, either actually ending up dead or at least ending up in a dead-end quagmire of pointless violence and immoral behaviour. Unflinching would be a gentle word to describe this portrayal of a doomed humanity, but the exact point of the film beyond its doomsday message is never really clear. Unlike other recent excursions into nihilism as expressed through heartless sex and pointless violence (Mortier’s Ex Drummer comes to mind as a recent example), Balabanov’s film never goes beyond stating the obvious.Read More »
The stoker is a veteran from the Afghanistan war, retired major and hero of the USSR who spends his life in a heating chamber writing a book and trowing coal on the fire. From time to time an old friend , veteran as well , pays him visits to throw in the fire something more than coal.The bales seem to be human bodies but the stoker doesn’t care because his friend tells him they were bad people.
The stoker’s beautiful daughter which lives with him only visits her father to ask him for money. The only interested in his work are two little girls that ask him the most surprising questions.Read More »