Drama

Harvard Film Archive writes:
One of the Coppola’s most overtly stylized works, Rumble Fish uses its breathtaking black and white, Koyanisqaatsi-inspired time-lapse photography and propulsive original score by The Police’s Stewart Copland to evoke a dream world of alienated youth. A beautiful postmodern art film, Rumble Fish is wonderfully uncertain of its time and place, stranding glittering icons of Fifties Americana – pool halls, flickering neon signs – within an Eighties post-industrial wasteland. The stylistic bricolage shapes the performances too, with Matt Dillon channeling Method Acting as a young man infatuated with the enigma of his self-absorbed brother, played with whispering intensity by a Marcel Camus-meets-Marlon Brando modeled Mickey Rourke. The late Dennis Hopper makes a poignant appearance as the absent even when present father who proves that the center inevitably cannot hold.Read More »

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A sympathetic, emotionally persuasive drama describing the friendship of four World War II veterans, their sudden reunion after 25 years and the subsequent effect of this occasion upon their thoughts and evaluations of the past and present. In a way, The Byelorussian Station is reminiscent of the poignant, realistic look at the returned soldier remembered in Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives. In this film, however, the sentiments are leavened by reminiscence and a touch of remorse, and the spectator must be prepared for a deeply moving cinematic adventure. Read More »

A story set in the back alleys and nightclubs of Beyoğlu among drag queens and prostitutes, pimps and hopeless lovers…

It shows all the dark corners of Beyoglu, Istanbul. Prostitutes, transexuals and their pimps are the protagonists of this movie, which is quite unlikely for a movie made in 1994. More strange thing is that the director creates a perfect atmosphere with real transsexuals, gay bars and night clubs.Read More »

A biography of the Three Stooges, in which their careers and rise to fame is shown throughout the eyes of their leader, Moe Howard.Read More »

This slice-of-life drama scripted by Paddy Chayefsky originated as a live 1953 television broadcast directed by Delbert Mann and starring Rod Steiger and Nancy Marchand. The movie version retained Mann as director but replaced the two leads with Ernest Borgnine and Betsy Blair. A kind of proto-Before Sunrise, it examines a watershed 24-hour period in the lives of two lonely people.Read More »

One entry of a trilogy of Seishun Kayo Eiga (youth film featuring songs) directed by Toshiya Fujita with Kumiko AkiyoshRead More »

The murder of a wealthy, much-married rancher (Lyle Talbot) in a posh Manhattan nightclub is the catalyst for The Falcon Out West. Amateur sleuth Tom Lawrence (Tom Conway), aka The Falcon, deduces that the victim was killed with rattlesnake venom.Read More »

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This movie was originally filmed in 1962 as Zastava Ilyicha (The Ilyich Gate). It was one of the first films that reflected the younger generation’s resentment of the older generation’s ways. The original title referred to Lenin’s paternal name (his full name was Vladimir Ilyich Lenin). Even after the decanonization of Stalin, Lenin still remained the icon for the old generation. “Ilyich” was often used as an affectionate term in Soviet iconography. The film invoked Soviet premier Nikita Khruschev’s sharp criticism. Meeting the studio members, he said: “Do you want us to believe in the scene where a father doesn’t know how to answer his son’s question “how to live?” At the censor’s insistence the movie was re-cut and released under the “apolitical” title Mne Dvatdsat Let (I’m Twenty) in 1964. In 1991, the film was re-released and shown at the London Film Festival with ninety minutes of the original footage restored, resulting in a film which was 175 minutes long.Read More »

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Etienne, a serious and impressionable shaggy-haired young cinephile, leaves behind his steady girlfriend in Lyon to study film in Paris. Settling into a dingy flat with a rotating cast of roommates, he immerses himself in a bohemian world of artists, intellectuals, and fellow film geeks who excitedly share their passion for Bresson, Ford, and obscure Russian directors.Read More »