USA

Film version of Melvin Van Peebles’ Broadway musical. A pair of devil-bats take human form and crash a Harlem house party in an attempt to break it up. But somehow, their attempts to ruin the party fail.Read More »

Charles Collins stars in Dancing Pirate as a dance teacher from Boston who is tricked into joining a band of pirates, leading him to be fitted for a noose in California. Compared to “Douglas Fairbanks in his most acrobatic days,” Collins catches a break when the mayor’s daughter (Steffi Duna) demands the hanging be postponed until he teaches her to waltz.

Dancing Pirate earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Dance Direction and was billed as “the first dancing musical in 100% new Technicolor.”Read More »

The wives of three wealthy men are kidnapped and held for a $3 million ransom, but one of the men doesn’t want to pay his share.Read More »

Quote:
An optically-printed canvas which explores the interior feel of world moving with inherent fluidity through a medium of wind and water. It presents an impressionistic portrait of unnatural forces that collide.Read More »

Quote:
On the northwest side of Milwaukee, Mark Borchardt dreams the American dream: for him, it’s making movies. Using relatives, local theater talent, slacker friends, his Mastercard, and $3,000 from his Uncle Bill, Mark strives over three years to finish “Covan,” a short horror film. His own personal demons (alcohol, gambling, a dysfunctional family) plague him, but he desperately wants to overcome self-doubt and avoid failure. In moments of reflection, Mark sees his story as quintessentially American, and its the nature and nuance of his dream that this film explores.Read More »

Quote:
Hitchcock’s long-standing fear of the police is what originally attracted him to a newspaper account of a family man wrongly identified as an armed robber. The Wrong Man pays scrupulous attention to such things as the details of police procedure and the eventual apprehension of the real culprit – before the conviction of the wrongly accused man (Fonda), but after the stress has driven his wife (Miles) to mental breakdown. The result is Hitchcock’s most sombre film, unrelieved by his usual macabre humour; the black-and-white photography and the persecuted Fonda’s sharply chiselled features lend an impressive documentary feel. It’s not generally rated among the master’s best works, largely because of the intractability of the source material (or Hitchcock’s unwillingness to dramatise the events). But there’s still plenty here for Hitchcockophiles: a Jesuitical strain (the man happened to be a devout Catholic), a complicity of guilt (as the wife irrationally comes to blame herself); and it’s pure noir.Read More »

Quote:
In this hard-hitting but humorous documentary, director Jamie Johnson takes the exploration of wealth that he began in Born Rich one step further. The One Percent, refers to the tiny percentage of Americans who control nearly half the wealth of the U.S. Johnson’s thesis is that this wealth in the hands of so few people is a danger to our very way of life. Johnson captures his story through personal interviews with Robert Reich, Adnan Khashoggi, Bill Gates Sr., and Steve Forbes, during which both Johnson’s and his subjects’ knowledge and humor shine. And he’s not afraid to butt heads with Milton Friedman, the economist who coined the term “the trickledown effect.” Read More »

Mega-promoter Colin Beverly plans to sabotage the New Year’s 1983 concert of small-time operator Max Wolfe. Wolfe’s assistants Neil Allen and Willie Loman find romance while trying to save the drugs, violence, and rock and roll from Beverly’s schemes.Read More »

Storyline
When Janet Furie’s scientist husband dies during an experiment gone wrong, she suspects that he was murdered by another scientist, Dr. Martin Becker. She hatches a clever revenge plan. By changing her looks and assuming a new identity, she insinuates herself into the life of Dr. Becker, all the while plotting to destroy his life and career. But is Dr. Becker really guilty?Read More »