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Mei is an exotic, beautiful blind dancer, associated with a dangerous revolutionary gang, known as the House of Flying Daggers. Captured by officers of the decadent Tang Dynasty, Mei finds herself both threatened by and attracted to the most unusual circumstances. Here, her heart and loyalties battle each other, amid warriors in the treetops and dazzling combat the likes of which have never before been seen!Read More »
Jan Jakub Kolski has earned himself a strange reputation. His mystical and folklorish films stand apart from the general flow of Central European cinema. Critics have found him to have more in common with the “magic realism” of South American prose than with his fellow Central European film directors.Read More »
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With this spare chamber piece, set in an empty theater, Ingmar Bergman returned to his perennial theme of the permeability of life and art. Lingering after a rehearsal for August Strindberg’s A Dream Play (a touchstone for the filmmaker throughout his career), eminent director Henrik (Erland Josephson) enters into a frank and flirtatious conversation with his up-and-coming star, Anna (Lena Olin), leading him to recall his affair with Anna’s late mother, the self-destructive actress Rakel (Ingrid Thulin). The sharply written and impeccably performed After the Rehearsal, originally made for television, pares away all artifice to examine both the allure and the cost of a life in the theater.Read More »
An out-of-work architect meets a married woman who has a business proposition for him. The architect begins to suspect the woman’s interest in him is not just financial and may actually be deadly.Read More »
IMDB says:
Anna a young girl is thought of having the ability to heal people mysteriously. Elisabeth a middle aged aristocratic woman, is disabled and puts all her hopes in meeting Anna and having her disability heal by her.Read More »
1776. Along with Lithuania and Prussia, Poland has succumbed to the might of the Russian Empire, but a determined resistance movement is working to bring an end to the country’s annexation. A young woman named Sonia is the figurehead of the Polish resistance fighters, but the Empress Catherine II has no fear of her, as she knows that Sonia is of Russian blood – a fact that she asks the Baron de Kempelen to make known to her political enemies. But Kempelen’s allegiances are ambiguous and he appears more preoccupied with the elaborate life-size automata he is working on than the political situation.Read More »
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[Toichiro Narushima’s] Time Within Memory (1973) was one of Takemitsu’s favorites films, but remains out of print. Film Critic Fritz Göttler considers this film to have been an ‘ideal collaboration…thoughtful and imaginative, a pure Takemitsu fantasy as antidote to films like The Ceremony or The Woman in the Dunes,’ while Klaus Volkmer laments its unavailability: One wants to see [Time Within Memory]—not possible. The early films from Shinoda…two films from Oshima have not been available for a long time…One can read about them—there are photos.Read More »
During Boys’ Week at racially integrated North High School, students Steve Smith, Gus Ruffo and Billy Anderson are elected to temporarily hold the city offices of district attorney, judge and chief of police. After Jewish tailor Herman refuses to pay protection money to Louis Garrett, Garrett’s gang bombs his store. Herman and the student who was with him survive the blast, but Herman is later murdered by Garrett after he again refuses to pay. Garrett is acquitted of murder charges because he has a perfect alibi. Steve, who had taken the stand during the trial, is humiliated by his experience as a witness because he failed to prove Garrett’s guilt. Read More »
Shannon Kelley writes:
The powers and fascinations of director John Ford and playwright Eugene O’Neill are happily met in this 1940 feature dramatizing the lives of men who serve as crew members aboard commercial freighters. Like O’Neill, Ford nursed a lifelong obsession with sailing and the sea, and had spent his early years in Portland, Maine, amid the maritime culture that this picture describes. Adapted and updated by screenwriter Dudley Nichols (Ford’s frequent collaborator) from four of O’Neill’s early plays set aboard the fictional “SS Glencairn,” the film recounts the experiences of the ship’s crew while transporting ammunition from the West Indies to England during World War II. Read More »