Romance

Veteran Hong Kong screenwriter Ivy Ho (Divergence) makes his feature directorial debut with this tale about a clandestine romance between a marketing secretary and a married manager. No one in the office suspects that Pearl (Karena Lin) and Tom (Ekin Cheng) are having an affair, not even their close friends Jewel (Chucky Woo) and John (Derek Tsang). As the story begins shifting between past and present, we come to understand just how the affair came to be, and where it could be heading in the future.
~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie GuideRead More »

Four prominent men take under their wing a young Parisian flower girl.
With the help of her Pygmalions she becomes a famous cabaret singer. She falls in love with a charming gambler, Henri, who becomes her first lover. Abandoned by him, and after years spent in Russia with Prince Vladimir, Frou-Frou returns to France, where she has to rebuild her own life by singing in second-order theaters.
She then meets and has a relationship with a painter, Michel, by whom she has a daughter. After Michel’s suicide she devotes herself to her.Read More »

Plot
An early CHC melodrama produced by Lumiton in 1943. Based on the British play Sixteen by Aimée & Philip Stuart.

A naive teenager faces a distressing reality when her widowed mother finds love anew 12 years after her first marriage ended.Read More »

Quote:
With this furiously witty comedy of manners, Katharine Hepburn revitalized her career and cemented her status as the era’s most iconic leading lady—thanks in great part to her own shrewd orchestrations. While starring in the Philip Barry stage play The Philadelphia Story, Hepburn acquired the screen rights, handpicking her friend George Cukor to direct. The intoxicating screenplay by Donald Ogden Stewart pits the formidable Philadelphia socialite Tracy Lord (Hepburn, at her most luminous) against various romantic foils, chief among them her charismatic ex-husband (Cary Grant), who disrupts her imminent marriage by paying her family estate a visit, accompanied by a tabloid reporter on assignment to cover the wedding of the year (James Stewart, in his only Academy Award–winning performance). A fast-talking screwball comedy as well as a tale of regret and reconciliation, this convergence of golden-age talent is one of the greatest American films of all time.Read More »

Quote:
Two years before stars Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant and director George Cukor would collaborate on The Philadelphia Story, they brought their timeless talents to this delectable slice of 1930s romantic-comedy perfection, the second film adaptation of a hit 1928 play by Philip Barry. Grant is at his charismatic best as the acrobatically inclined free spirit who, following a whirlwind engagement, literally tumbles into the lives of his fiancée’s aristocratic family—setting up a clash of values with her staid father while firing the rebellious imagination of her brash, black-sheep sister (Hepburn). With a sparkling surface and an undercurrent of melancholy, Holiday is an enchanting ode to nonconformists and pie-in-the-sky dreamers everywhere, as well as a thoughtful reflection on what it truly means to live well.Read More »

Quote:
Olivia captures the awakening passions of an English adolescent sent away for a year to a small finishing school outside Paris. The innocent but watchful Olivia develops an infatuation for her headmistress, Mlle. Julie, and through this screen of love observes the tense romance between Mlle. Julie and the other head of the school, Mlle. Cara, in its final months. Although not strictly autobiographical, Olivia draws on the author’s experiences at finishing schools run by the charismatic Mlle. Marie Souvestre, whose influence lived on through former students like Natalie Barney and Eleanor Roosevelt. Colette wrote the screenplay for the 1951 film adaptation of the novel.Read More »

Quote:
A simple governess and a wealthy aristocrat fall madly in love with each other. However, his family are prejudiced towards her and have other plans for him.Read More »

Quote:
Simple conversations engender complicated human interactions. Jeanne is open and even-tempered, a philosophy teacher at a lycée. Her fiancé is away and she doesn’t want to stay at his messy flat; she’s loaned hers to a cousin, so she accepts the invitation of Natasha, a music student whom she meets at a party, to sleep in her father Igor’s bedroom.Read More »

Synopsis:
‘When she discovers her students are hiding their true thoughts and feelings, Karla, a young and idealistic teacher at the start of her career, goes against the routine opportunism, hypocritisy and small-mindedness all around her. Her superiors view her actions with unease, however, and eventually step in to discipline her.
This film, written by renowned author Ulrich Plenzdorf, was considered nihilistic, skeptical and hostile by officials. It became one of the dozen East German films banned in 1965-66. Only in 1990, after the fall of the Wall, was Karla finally screened in cinemas.’
– DEFA Film LibraryRead More »