Musical

From Mosfilm:
Andrey Balashov, a pianist, had to quit music after being wounded during the Great Patriotic War. Having failed to say goodbye to his friends and Natasha whom he loved he left for Siberia. He worked at the construction of an industrial complex and sang in a teahouse. An accidental meeting with his friends and Natasha changed his life. Andrey left for the Arctic region where being inspired by heroic labor of the builders he wrote a symphonic oratorio «Tale of Siberian Land» that won everybody’s recognition and made him popular in Moscow where Natasha was looking forward to see her true-love.Read More »

The third and definitive film adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s 1900 children’s fantasy, this musical adventure is a genuine family classic that made Judy Garland a star for her heartfelt performance as Dorothy Gale, an orphaned young girl unhappy with her drab black-and-white existence on her aunt and uncle’s dusty Kansas farm.

Dorothy yearns to travel “over the rainbow” to a different world, and she gets her wish when a tornado whisks her and her little dog, Toto, to the Technicolorful land of Oz. Having offended the Wicked Witch of the West (Margaret Hamilton), Dorothy is protected from the old crone’s wrath by the ruby slippers that she wears.Read More »

Excerpt from the NFO:
Lou Reed co-founder of The Velvet Underground and the man behind such iconic rock songs as Sweet Jane and Walk on the Wild Side stars in one of the most satisfying concert films (Lee Marshall, Screen International) in decades. Oscar-nominated director Julian Schnabel (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) captures this historic moment in time, as Reed performed his legendary 1973 album, Berlin, live for the first time. Rocking horns, soulful guitar and the angelic voices of the Brooklyn Youth Chorus bring Reed s devastatingly honest lyrics to full life in this exceptionally strong performance.Read More »

Synopsis “Jeanette” is a musical drama based on Charles Peguy’s play “Le Mystère de la charité de Jeanne d’Arc” (1910). It focuses on the part of Peguy’s play that deals with Joan of Arc as a child, from age 8-12, when she started to embrace her sacred mission.

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From Rockfilm.ru
Rock
It became a cult movie for an entire generation. And it’s significance only increases as the years pass. Rock musicians who were the founders of contemporary rock culture are captured here in their youth: giants such as Boris Grebenshchikov, Yuri Shevchuk, Viktor Tsoi, Oleg Garkusha, and Anton Adasinsky. “Rock” is a film about fate and about music; it is the portrait of a generation. Director Uchitel observes his characters up close, and offers up the same unique opportunity to his audience.
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Quote:
Robert Altman’s brilliantly freewheeling satire on the country and western music industry made little impression on the American box office in 1975. This was the year, remember, when a giant shark in Jaws inaugurated the modern blockbuster era. But three decades on, Nashville feels like one of the outstanding accomplishments of ‘New Hollywood’. 24 characters – including singers, musicians, agents, publicists, journalists, and assorted wannabees and hangers-on – converge on the capital of Tennessee, as a confused nation prepares to celebrate its bicentenary.Read More »

Quote:
Vive La France by Serge Bozon, a heady experiment full of soul that more than delivers on the allegorical chutzpah of its title. On receiving a troubling letter from her husband, a soldier in the First World War, Camille (Sylvie Testud) sets off to find him incognito, chopping her coif and wrapping her boobs to pass as a lad of 17. Deep in a forest landscape rendered with limpid concentration by cinematographer Céline Bozon, she falls in with a clutch of soldiers mobilized to the front. Or so it seems: Strange things are afoot in La France—like the spontaneous performance of twee, jangling ballads, rendered on scrap-yard acoustic instruments and sung, from an unabashed female perspective, by the harmonizing grunts. Weirder than the arrival of these inexplicable neo-retro-folk jams is how seamlessly they fit into Bozon’s melancholic war fable. Which is to say La France invents a curious and confident hybrid mode to accommodate, even reconcile, disparate modes and strategies: war film and musical, elegiac and avant-garde, cerebral and poignant, rigorous and flexible.Read More »

Space travel has become a dirty way of life dominated by derelicts, grease monkeys, and hard-boiled interplanetary traders such as Samuel Curtis. Written, directed, and starring Cory McAbee of the legendary cult band The Billy Nayer Show, this sci-fi, musical-western uses flinty black and white photography, rugged Lo-Fi sets and the spirit of the final frontier. We follow Curtis on his Homeric journey to provide the all-female planet of Venus with a suitable male, while pursued by an enigmatic killer, Professor Hess. The film features music by The Billy Nayer Show and some of the most original rock n’ roll scenes ever committed to film.Read More »

Considered to be one of the most powerful and emotional Greek movies, Rembetiko focuses on the life of an individual woman, a real person, and through her personal story, it retells the story of Greece, from 1920 to 1955: the national disaster in Minor Asia, the one million refugees who came to Greece, the World War II, the Nazi occupation, the Civil War, immigration. The revival of an era, the recall of lost ethics of the old time musicians, and all the elements of a popular music drama, compose this epic masterpiece, accompanied by the music and songs of Stavros Xarhakos (most of them with lyrics by Nikos Gkatsos).

A voyage to history of the first half of the 20th century, but also a voyage to the origins of rembetiko – a Greek form of urban blues performed in lowclass joints where the social misfits of the twenties known as “rembetes” gathered.Read More »