USA

Lawyer Bob cheats on his uptight wife Cindy by spending an afternoon with a prostitute. Bob’s buddy Ted also commits infidelity on his spouse Julie by seducing his secretary. Bob and Ted decide to further spice up their sex lives by swapping wives without their knowledge. However, Cindy and Julie find out about what their husbands have done, so they plot to get even on the guys by following them to the exotic nightspot The Mask Club and joining in on the carnal activities going on at said club.Read More »

Synopsis:
This beautifully-filmed CinemaScope western spins the familiar plot of a greedy cattle baron taking the law into his own hands to monopolize a rich valley before legal claims can be filed on the land. Tab Hunter and Natalie Wood are the headliners here and their chemistry works well. Hunter is okay as a cowboy who wants to square matters for his brother’s murder. However, Ms. Wood is not very convincing as a Mexican girl, in spite of her fetching looks. Predictably, romance blooms, and Hunter and Wood team up to battle the bad guys who trail them like bloodhounds. The action is spotty but a solid cast of familiar character actors nudges the story along. The film has a fine climax, a derring-do affair in the spirit of the old west. The movie was based on a good Louis L’Amour novel and nearly measures up to this great storyteller’s work.Read More »

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Emma Mae (1976)

While writer-director Jamaa Fanaka intentionally frustrates any association with Blaxploitation, he courts the forms of that money-grubbing action subgenre for the purposes of his 1976 film Emma Mae, if only to subvert them. As such, the film occupies a lonely middle ground between such well-remembered grindhouse titles as Black Mama, White Mama (1972) and The Mack (1973) and the scattering of Black family dramas to which the big studios condescended in the early to mid-70s, such as Oscar Williams’ Five on the Black Hand Side (1973) and Michael Schultz’s Cooley High (1975). The latter was a direct influence on Fanaka while he was a student at UCLA’s film program and Emma Mae, his second feature, reflects a similar interest in depicting the texture of African-American community and family life in all its contrasting and contradictory patterns. Read More »

Classic British mystery thriller starring Tom Conway as suave gumshoe, Norman
Conquest. After intercepting a secret message, Conquest meets foreign femme fatale,
Nadina Rodin (Eva Bartok), in room 605 of the Park Plaza hotel. When Conquest wakes up
in the room the next morning he is lying next to a corpse and the mysterious Rodin is
nowhere to be seen. Conquest is now the police’s number one murder suspect with
Inspector Williams (Sid James) shadowing his every move. In order to clear his name,
Conquest enlists the help of Pixie Everard (Joy Shelton), but things turn even uglier when
he discovers that the murder is connected to a stash of stolen diamonds. As gun-toting,Read More »

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The film is a day in the life of a young artist, Jean Michel Basquiat, who needs to raise money to reclaim the apartment from which he has been evicted. He wanders the downtown streets carrying a painting he hopes to sell, encountering friends, whose lives (and performances) we peek into. He finally manages to sell his painting to a wealthy female admirer, but he’s paid by check. Low on cash, he spends the evening wandering from club to club, looking for a beautiful girl he had met earlier, so he’ll have a place to spend the night. Downtown 81 not only captures one of the most interesting and lively artists of the twentieth century as he is poised for fame, but it is a slice of life from one of the most exciting periods in American culture, with the emergence of new wave music, new painting, hip hop and graffiti. — Sujit R. VarmaRead More »

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An island off the New England coast, summer of 1965. Two twelve-year-olds, Sam and Suzy, fall in love, make a secret pact, and run away together into the wilderness. As local authorities try to hunt them down, a violent storm is brewing offshore . . . Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom stars Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward as the young couple on the run, Bruce Willis as Island Police Captain Sharp, Edward Norton as Khaki Scout troop leader Scout Master Ward, and Bill Murray and Frances McDormand as Suzy’s attorney parents, Walt and Laura Bishop. The cast also includes Tilda Swinton, Jason Schwartzman, and Bob Balaban. The magical soundtrack features the music of Benjamin Britten.Read More »

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“Legendary avant-garde filmmaker and visual artist James Benning returns to the Festival with L. COHEN, one of the year’s most awe-inspiring and transcendent experiences. Benning has described the landscape as ‘a function of time’ and this film elegantly invites us to savour the relationship. Shot in a barren Oregon field, the film’s fixed camera presents us with the deceptively simple: canary-coloured jerry can, twin tires, some rusty barrels, abandoned agricultural machinery, a plain of green grass and overgrown hay, and faint, portentous details in the distance.Read More »

Set during the Vietnam war before U.S. involvement, this political drama tells the gripping story of an American operative who is sent to Saigon to protect the U.S. ambassador from an unknown assassin’s bullet. ~ Sandra Brennan, RoviRead More »

A Harold Lloyd two-reeler that was planned as a three-reeler; after an unsuccessful preview, the first reel was axed.Read More »