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The decline in the career of Ramon Novarro, MGM’s eager & energetic romantic leading man, can trace its beginnings to this unfortunate little film. After his great success with THE PAGAN & DEVIL-MAY-CARE (both 1929), this had to have been quite a disappointment. With his pleasant accent & fine singing voice, Novarro had already proved that talking pictures would be no problem for him – if given the right roles.Read More »
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Mimmi, Emma and Rönkkö are girls at the cusp of womanhood, trying to draw their own contours. In three consecutive Fridays, two of them experience the earth moving effects of falling in love, while the third goes on a quest to find something she’s never experienced before: pleasure.Read More »
After twenty-five years of exile in Paris, Jana returns to Vilnius. She wants to find the lake that Paulius, her first lover, called “Walden”. Chronicle elegiac of Lithuanian youth before the fall of the communist bloc.Read More »
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A well-bred, lovely, spiritual, sad young woman marries an attentive physician who loves her. She feels affection but no love. Soon after, without design, she falls in love with Pedro Abrunhosa, a poet and performance artist. He also loves her. She keeps her distance from him, confessing her love to a friend who is a nun and, later, to her husband. Hunger for her love and jealousy consume him; she attends him as he wastes away. With his death, she can marry and express her passion, but what she does and how she explains herself, particularly to her cloistered friend, is at the heart of the film. Glimpses of convent life and of Abrunhosa on stage give contrast and mute comment.Read More »
Rezeta is a carefree 21 year old model. Born in Kosovo, she traveled the world through modeling and chose Mexico City as her new home. Rezeta’s partying lifestyle changes when she meets Alex who is cleaning her trailer during a commercial shoot. Their undeniable chemistry causes their friendship to grow into a complicated relationship. Rezeta has to either commit to Alex and Mexico City, or continue with her whimsical, jet-setting life.Read More »
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Khamoshi is a 1969 black-and-white Hindi film directed by Asit Sen, starring Rajesh Khanna and Waheeda Rehman. It especially remembered for its songs with music by Hemant Kumar and some haunting lyrics by Gulzar, who also wrote films equally effective dialogues. Though what really made this film stand out was the B &W cinematography by Kamal Bose, who won the Filmfare Award for its work. The film is considered Waheeda Rehman’s finest acting feat, as she carries the entire film through her powerful yet understated acting, she received a Filmfare nomination for it.Read More »
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In 1985, four middle-aged Yugoslav emigres return to Belgrade for the funeral of Mariana, their beautiful compatriot. They called her Esther, for Esther Williams, she was the coxswain for their four-man rowing team, and they each loved her. They’d last seen her in 1953, when they rowed her across the Adriatic, pregnant, to join her exiled father in Italy. In flashbacks we learn the story of their youthful baptism into sex, smoking, rock and roll (Hey Ba-ba-re-bop), Hollywood and Swedish films, blue jeans on the black market, and their rivalry with Ristic, the Communist Party youth leader for whom they had instant antipathy.Read More »
A raro video with a great interpretation of Mariangela Melato
In the summer of 1943, during the war, Francesca, widow mother of three little girls, leaves Bologna to go to in a country house, where he finds an old love Guido and other friends, all displaced people like her.
The young woman has a great passion for America and his music (she told to the daughters that their father lives in the States).
One day an American man named Ray, pilot of reconnaissance aircraft, is forced by breakdown to land near the farmhouse.Read More »
After spending the 1930s as the Third Reich’s principal cinematic chronicler, Leni Riefenstahl returned to fictional films with Tiefland. According to Riefenstahl, she had refused to make any more propaganda pictures–“for good reasons,” she explained enigmatically–choosing instead to direct a period romance, based on an old Spanish play and opera by Eugen d’Albert. Riefenstahl cast herself as the central character, Marta, a Spanish dancer who becomes the romantic bone of contention between humble shepherd Franz Eichberger and imperious marquis Bernhard Minetti. While the material seems to cry out for music, Riefenstahl plays the story straight, though much of the acting can certainly be described as operatic.Read More »