A more horrific and gloomy version of The Beauty and the Beast. Julie, the youngest daughter of a bankrupt merchant, sacrifices her life in order to save her father. She goes to an enchanted castle in the woods and meets Netvor, a bird-like monster. As Netvor begins to fall in love with Julie, he must suppress his beastly urge to kill her.Read More »
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Alice is a daydreaming young girl. She finds learning poems and listening to literature boring. She prefers stories with pictures and to live inside her imagination. One day, while enduring just such a poetry reading, she spots a large white rabbit…dressed in a jacket and carrying a large watch. He scurries off, saying he’s late, for a very important date. She follows him through the forest. He then disappears down a rabbit hole. Alice follows, leading her to all manner of discoveries, characters and adventures.Read More »
This hilarious movie catapults two youngsters hitting puberty into the opposite sex after a fall from which they recover in each other’s bodies. The timid sensitive girl becomes the effeminate insecure boy, and the unredeeming prankster becomes the loud clumsy girl with a chip on her shoulder. Both lead actors do tremendous jobs portraying the opposite sex, and often do so delivering more than a laugh. It ends in a bittersweet tone, but it is a really cute movie with hilarious moments.Read More »
Denis Cote chronicles the bizarre after-effects of a small-town tragedy, weaving supernatural elements into the tattered social fabric of a rural community.
Loosely adapted from the debut novel by Montreal-based writer Laurence Olivier, this is a curious film, deliberately threadbare in its plotting and muted in its emotional effect. But it is open to any number of interpretations, touching on fear of outsiders and otherness, the importance of reckoning with the past and the danger for insular small-town communities of being forgotten, as much due to their own closed-off nature as to big-city migration. It could just as easily be dismissed as slight, but you get out of it what you’re willing to put in.Read More »
The noir city in all its desperate foreboding: a dancing sign flashes in an angel’s face. An angel innocent and afraid yet ventures into the seething labyrinth with a stranger, her husband, running from capture into the city of entrapment.
You trust no-one, fear the worst, and blunder from one dead-end into another. Dark faces and sharp dressers in sinister doorways. Share a cab with a bawling waif, a dying woman on borrowed time, and a suspicious driver. Stop! Get out! Onto dark streets, smoke-filled dives, cafés on the edge of purgatory, and hellish rooms for rent. A young girl in pig-tails as likely to betray you as the mother with arms folded in menace then her cold hand out for payment in advance. Nowhere left to run. The rented room a cell you can’t leave.
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Professor Challenger leads an expedition of scientists and adventurers to a remote plateau deep in the Amazonian jungle to verify his claim that dinosaurs still live there.Read More »
Evil old Silas Barnaby threatens to evict Widow Peep, who lives in a shoe, unless she lets him marry her daughter Bo-Beep, who is in love with the dashing young Tom-Tom. Desperate for money to pay off her mortgage, Widow Peep asks her boarders Stan and Ollie for help. They try to get money from their employer, but are fired instead. Since there’s no way out, Ollie leads Bo-Peep to the altar. As soon as the marriage vows are pronounced, Ollie gets the deed to the shoe and rips it up. Beneath the bride’s veil, however, is not a blushing virgin but…Stan! Silas seeks revenge by banishing Tom-Tom to Bogeyland, but with the help of Stan, Ollie and a mouse, Tom-Tom and Bo-Peep are saved and the monsters of Bogeyland chased out of Toyland.Read More »
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Most of French director Albert Lamorisse’s films celebrate the miracle of flight, but few were as landmark as his 1956 short subject The Red Balloon. The story, told with a minimum of dialogue, concerns a little boy (played by the director’s son Pascal) who comes across a helium-filled balloon. As he plays with his new acquisition, the boy discovers that the balloon seemingly has a mind of its own. The little red orb follows its new “master” all through the streets of Paris, then dogs the boy’s trail into the schoolroom, which drives the teacher to comic distraction. Towards the end, it seems as though boy and balloon will be parted forever….but director Lamorisse has a delightful surprise in store for us. In an unusual move, The Red Balloon in its American TV premiere was introduced by Ronald Reagan as an episode of the CBS anthology G.E. Theater on April 2, 1961.Read More »
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In the abandoned streets of a post-apocalyptic wasteland, a young girl protects a mysterious egg with her life. She meets a mysterious drifter who is interested in what may be inside the egg.
A masterpiece of allegory and surrealism. Exploring art history and dream logic, Oshii’s early film is perhaps the most purely visual in his oeuvre.Read More »