USA

With Love From Truman portrays an intimate meeting with renowned author Truman Capote. As a reporter interviews him in his beachfront home, Capote shares his “self-regarding” personality through hip philosophy and calculated jokes. He offers insights in an endearingly raspy voice about his latest book, In Cold Blood, which Capote declares to be part of a new genre, the “non-fiction novel.” Just as the Maysles brothers’ direct cinema classics turn real stories into narratives, Capote’s non-fiction novel makes an effort to turn reality into art. In Cold Blood is based on first-hand accounts of an actual murder. The author affectionately discusses his coverage of the subsequent trial and his intriguing relationship with the two young killers. Capote claims it is the spontaneity of life that compels him to portray reality, but it is his own fresh energy and startling sense of humor that keep us intrigued.Read More »

Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive writes:
Hailed as John Huston’s “comeback” film in 1972, Fat City is a film that deserves to come back more often. Based on a novel by Leonard Gardner, who also wrote the screenplay, and photographed by the excellent Conrad Hall (In Cold Blood), it is a portrait of the seedy, small-time boxing milieu of Stockton, CA. (“Huston is in his element here,” Andrew Sarris wrote, “simply because his realistic affectations have always been merely a cover and an alibi for his romantic affection for the compulsive losers of this world.”) The losers in Fat City are two prizefighters (Stacy Keach and Jeff Bridges), a sherry-drinking barfly (Susan Tyrrell), her jailed and released black lover (Curtis Cokes), and assorted fight managers, boxers, lettuce pickers, bartenders and countermen…Read More »

Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin is a feature documentary exploring the remarkable life and legacy of the late feminist author Ursula K. Le Guin. Best known for groundbreaking science fiction and fantasy works such as A Wizard of Earthsea, The Left Hand of Darkness, and The Dispossessed, Le Guin defiantly held her ground on the margin of “respectable” literature until the sheer excellence of her work, at long last, forced the mainstream to embrace fantastic literature. Her fascinating story has never before been captured on film.Read More »

Willem Dafoe’s first credited screen role.
A group of leather-clad bikers en route to some blistering racing action in Daytona, Fla., makes a pit stop in a backwater Georgia town. While waiting for one of their hogs to get fixed, the gang decides to raise hell. But they get more than they bargained for when the townsfolk battle back in this moody homage to “The Wild One.”Read More »

New Beverly Cinema writes:
Charlie (Mickey Rourke) is a restaurant manager and small-time hustler aspiring for more. Paulie (Eric Roberts) is his desperate, hotheaded cousin who thinks he may have just found it: the easiest money they’ll ever make, and it’s just sitting there! But the heist goes sour and attracts the ire of local mobsters. These two goombahs are taking huge risks, and their Little Italy lives start to feel a whole lot bigger. An irreverent coming-of-age tale and urban jungle crime story, The Pope of Greenwich Village captures the sensory experience of New York City, from the cut of a nice suit to wailing police sirens to the feeling of fifty thousand dollars right in your hand.Read More »

Ridley Scott: A Critical Filmography
by William B. Parrill
Paperback: 189 pages
Publisher: McFarland & Company (July 15, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0786458666
ISBN-13: 978-0786458660Read More »

An investigation into the ecological disaster caused by a US military base on the Philippines – and its victims, their world. A humble act of solidarity, a defiant work of remembrance, a rallying cry to rise and resist, a cinematic prose poem.Read More »

Eastman Museum writes:
An epic romance of doomed love, Doctor Zhivago is set amidst the tumultuous years encompassing World War I, the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the Russian Civil War. Yuri Zhivago (Omar Sharif) is a married physician and poet who falls madly in love with Lara (Julie Christie), a nurse who is also married. The tangled epic of love and war “did nothing less than re-create Moscow and its countryside,” according to Roger Ebert. “Doctor Zhivago,” Ebert continues, “believes that history should have a lot of room for personal feelings . . . the individual over the state, the heart over the mind.” Banned in the Soviet Union for decades, Doctor Zhivago won five of the ten Academy Awards for which it was nominated and has continued to garner acclaim ever since.Read More »

Synopsis:
West Texas in the years after the Civil War is an uneasy meeting ground of two cultures, one white. The other native American. Elvis portrays Pacer Burton. The son of a white rancher (John McIntire) and his beautiful Kiowa Indian wife (Dolores DelRio). When fighting breaks out between the settlers and natives, Pacer tries to act as a peace maker, but the “flaming star of death” pulls him irrevocably into the deadly violence.Read More »