USA

Synopsis
The unlikely relationship between a pregnant high school student and a brooding electronics repairman lies at the center of this droll comedy from writer-director Hal Hartley. Intelligent but unconventional, Maria (Adrienne Shelly) has more to worry about than her pregnancy, as her expectant state drives away her boyfriend and triggers a fatal heart attack in her father. Meanwhile, Matthew (Martin Donovan) has his own problems: an abusive father, a heightened sense of morality that prevents him from taking semi-lucrative television repair jobs, and a suicidal streak that causes him to carry around a potentially deadly grenade. The meeting of these troubled minds at first promises to be beneficial for both, but sours as they are forced to interact with each other’s dysfunctional families. As in all of Hartley’s pictures, the narrative is filtered through an amusingly detached sensibility that some may consider an acquired taste.
~ Judd Blaise, All Movie GuideRead More »

The son of a jailed Wall Street broker turns to crime to pay for his father’s release.

synopsis

Tyrone Power plays the college-grad son of jailed-embezzler Edward Arnold. Power tries to find work, only to be turned away because of his father’s reputation. When he decides to use a phony name, he is still fired, because his ex-convict boss feels that Power is being unfair to his imprisoned father. If you can’t win for losing in a 1940 film, you turn to crime. Power hires on as the right-hand man of personable but deadly gangster Lloyd Nolan. Arnold, who has become a model convict, is disgusted that his son has turned to crime. He even refuses to have anything to do with his son when Power lands in the slammer himself. Through the intervention of Nolan’s moll Dorothy Lamour, a nightclub singer who has grown to love Power, Arnold realizes that his son is still a good guy underneath. Power proves as much by preventing a climactic jailbreak engineered by the homicidal Nolan.Read More »

Plot: Comedy-mystery finds Detectives Kelly and Dempsey trapped in a deserted lighthouse with a group of strangers who are being terrorized by a killer octopus AND a mysterious crime figure named after the title sea creature. Written by Marty McKee Read More »

A fevered yet clinical study of jealousy, Leave Her to Heaven is probably John M. Stahl’s best-known film. In many ways, it is far removed from the sober, intense concentration of Stahl’s major and underseen ’30s soap operas; his early movies were deliberately plain and spare, while Leave Her to Heaven is overpoweringly artificial and rococo, with intimations of neurotic fantasies churning away underneath its lacquered, rotogravure images. Immediately pulsing with the thumping drums of Alfred Newman’s stormy score, the film proceeds very slowly at first, as Stahl builds a dreamlike Technicolor atmosphere around his three leads, Gene Tierney, Cornel Wilde, and Jeanne Crain. These actors are eerily one-dimensional, and Stahl uses their limitations as performers to his advantage, making them look like sleepwalkers in a sort of Life magazine nightmare.Read More »

Synopsis:
Welcome to New York is a 2014 French-American drama film co-written and directed by Abel Ferrara. Inspired by the Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair, the film was released on 17 May 2014 by VOD on the internet as the film failed to secure a place on the official selection at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, nor was it picked up for theatrical distribution in France and is facing self-censorship by the French media, according to Vincent Maraval, one of the producers.Read More »

Most of us have been in the situation where we’ve had one too many cups of coffee, there are the jittery side effects, the quickened speech, the racing heartbeat—but that’s all in a day’s work for Winter, the mono-named star of Starbucking. Winter’s mission is to visit each and every official Starbucks in the world, as of this date he’s been to 6,939 stores, and this entertaining documentary allows a peek at his borderline manic journey and his optimistically caffeinated world.

Hate them or love them, for a lot of people Starbucks is part of the daily routine; you stop in to pick up coffee, maybe grab a newspaper or a muffin, and then head to the office. But for Winter, Starbucks sort of is the office. For the past 10 years he’s trekked all over the world—when he’s on the road he literally lives out of his car, even sleeping in his small Honda hatchback—in a seemingly never-ending attempt to reach his goal. He seems to realize it’s a process that is likely to last his lifetime, but he is completely undeterred.
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REVIEWS:
A well-crafted film, 24 February 2001
Author: jeffreynothing from Toronto, Canada

I saw this film at a screening several years ago at the Edinburgh Film Festival. The picture was actually introduced by Mr.Ulmer’s daughter. It’s a typical 1940’s melodrama that is well directed. It is apparent in viewing the film that Ulmer knew exactly what he was doing when he made a movie. It was only the second Ulmer film I had seen, the first being the superior Detour. I can’t remember the plot in too much detail because it was a while ago, but it involves an illegitimate child. It has a good social message in that it sheds light on how so-called “bastard” children are sometimes the subjects of social discrimination. I’m surprised it hasn’t received more votes. I guess I was lucky to catch that screening.Read More »

Synopsis:
Rogosin took the fight for equality to his homeland with his astonishing and powerful fourth feature Black Roots. The film, which is ripe for rediscovery, featured an extraordinary cast, including Reverend Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick; attorney and feminist activist Florynce “”Flo”” Kennedy; and musicians Jim Collier, Wende Smith, Larry Johnson and Reverend Gary Davis. All tell stories of heartbreak and despair while their songs blow the roof off the rafters. In an extension of the famed shebeen scenes in Come Back, Africa, the participants in Black Roots spoke openly about politics and race in a way that is still rarely seen on screen. In 1970, it was a radical and daring move by a great director. A deeply humanist film, Black Roots combines tales of oppression with hauntingly beautiful images of the faces of black men, women and children.Read More »

Quote:
“The Grand Budapest Hotel” is the movie that Wes Anderson has been hinting at and promising for 15 years. It has wit and yet doesn’t short-circuit emotion, style that’s more than a gesture or attitude, and good scenes that don’t only stand alone but that build and become part of a substantial whole. It is every bit what people think of when they think of a Wes Anderson movie, only this time the gap between the talent and the achievement is gone.

It’s set primarily in the early 1930s, in a fictional central European city, with shades of Budapest, Prague and Vienna – but not the real Budapest, Prague and Vienna, but rather those cities as imagined and dreamed across a distance of time and space. The hotel of the title is like a hotel in a Greta Garbo movie, except rendered in candy colors, harking back to a time when people really believed that splendor and refinement were states of the soul, not mere acts of display.Read More »