USA

Synopsis:
When a plague devastated life on Earth, the population died or became a sort of zombie living in the dark. Dr. Robert Morgan is the unique healthy survivor on the planet, having a routine life for his own survival: he kills the night creatures along the day and maintains the safety of his house, to be protected along the night. He misses his beloved wife and daughter, consumed by the outbreak, and he fights against his loneliness to maintain mentally sane. When Dr. Morgan finds the contaminated Ruth Collins, he uses his blood to heal her and he becomes the last hope on Earth to help the other contaminated survivors. But the order of this new society is scary.Read More »

Review of the film from the IMDb by “AlsExGal” (posted 31 January, 2010):
At a time when musicals had fallen completely out of favor with the movie-going public, Eddie Cantor and Busby Berkeley were still able to bring smiles to faces and audiences into theaters with this 1931 pseudo-musical by offering a bankable star (Cantor) in a foolproof formula. The title refers to a ring of bogus spiritualists for which Cantor’s character has served unwittingly as a front man. During the film Eddie falls repeatedly into some dangerous or embarrassing situation and by virtue of his own hyperactivity emerges victorious in each case.Read More »

In the future, humanity has been genetically engineered into four classes, ranging from the decision-making Alphas to the worker class Drones. The notion of individual relationships is outdated and people are encouraged to seek pleasure with anybody else. The use of the drug Soma, which provides instant happiness, is widespread. Bernard Marx is a rising publicity man with the Department of Hatcheries and Conditioning. He and his companion Lenina Crowne fly over the Savage Reservations where people who were born by natural means live outside of civilisation, but their helicopter crashes. One of the Savages, John Cooper, saves them from an attacking mob. Fascinated by John, they bring him back to the city where he becomes an object of curiosity by the sensation-starved populace. However, John also comes to challenge their beliefs about the society they live in.Read More »

Jean-Luc Godard’s review of the film (and Artists and Models) from the August-September 1956 issue of Cahiers du Cinéma:

The grotesque is an anything but easy genre. It requires sensitivity rather than intelligence, so many of the smartest directors come to grief with it. No chance of cheating here, of escaping into the ivory tower of the misunderstood…Read More »

Tyler, a sole black man, attends an otherwise all-white weekend of drunken debauchery on a birthday trip to a cabin in the Catskills.Read More »

Synopsis:
A police lieutenant sets out to break up a ring of tire bootleggers–criminals who sell defective tires to customers who can’t get new ones because of the rubber shortage brought about by the war. His task is complicated by the fact that his brother is mixed up in the racket and that they are both in love with the same girl.Read More »

Cremaster 4 adheres most closely to the project’s biological model. This penultimate episode describes the system’s onward rush toward descension despite its resistance to division. The logo for this chapter is the Manx triskelion – three identical armored legs revolving around a central axis. Set on the Isle of Man, the film absorbs the island’s folklore as well as its more recent incarnation as host to the Tourist Trophy motorcycle race. Myth and machine combine to narrate a story of candidacy, which involves a trial of the will articulated by a series of passages and transformations. The film comprises three main character zones. Read More »

CREMASTER 3 (2002) is set in New York City and narrates the construction of the Chrysler Building, which is in itself a character – host to inner, antagonistic forces at play for access to the process of (spiritual) transcendence. These factions find form in the struggle between Hiram Abiff or the Architect (played by Richard Serra), and the Entered Apprentice (played by Barney), who are both working on the building. They are reenacting the Masonic myth of Hiram Abiff, purported architect of Solomon’s Temple, who possessed knowledge of the mysteries of the universe. The murder and resurrection of Abiff are reenacted during Masonic initiation rites as the culmination of a three-part process through which a candidate progresses from the first degree of Entered Apprenticeship to the third of Master Mason.Read More »

Cremaster 2 is rendered as a gothic Western that introduces conflict into the system. On the biological level it corresponds to the phase of fetal development during which sexual division begins. In Matthew Barney’s abstraction of this process, the system resists partition and tries to remain in the state of equilibrium imagined in Cremaster 1. Cremaster 2 embodies this regressive impulse through its looping narrative, moving from 1977, the year of Gary Gilmore’s execution, to 1893, when Harry Houdini, who may have been Gilmore’s grandfather, performed at the World’s Columbian Exposition. The film is structured around three interrelated themes – the landscape as witness, the story of Gilmore (played by Barney), and the life of bees—that metaphorically describe the potential of moving backward in order to escape one’s destiny.Read More »