USA

Description: Over a meal in a French restaurant, Sy poses a conundrum to his fellow diners: Is the essence of life comic or tragic? For the sake of argument, he tells a story, which the others then embellish to illustrate their takes on life. The story starts as follows: A young Manhattan couple, Park Avenue princess Laurel and tippling actor Lee, throw a dinner party to impress Lee’s would-be producer when their long-lost friend Melinda appears at their front door, bedraggled and woebegone. In the tragic version of what happens next, the beautiful intruder is a disturbed woman who got bored with her Midwestern doctor-husband and dumped him for a photographer. Her husband took the children away and she spiraled into a suicidal depression that landed her straight-jacketed in a mental ward. In the comic version, Melinda is childless and a downstairs neighbor to the dinner hosts, who are ambitious Indy filmmaker Susan and under-employed actor Hobie. Back and forth the stories go, contrasting the destinies of the two Melindas.Read More »

Quote:
The older Woody Allen gets, the more the nebbish-jester mask dissolves to reveal the pinched sneerer underneath. Can a longtime comedy writer really be this unwarmed by life? In You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, the writer-director’s London-set roundelay of neurotics, muses, and frauds, the mysterious stranger of the cumbersome title turns out to be not Antonio Banderas (who joins Freida Pinto in playing insultingly “exotic” objects of desire for the rest of the cast), but, as one character points out, the Grim Reaper himself. The fact that such moldy fatalism feels truer to Allen’s worldview than, say, the faux-sensualism of Vicky Cristina Barcelona doesn’t exactly ameliorate the sourness of this ensemble dramedy, which plays less as a critique of the characters’ willful delusions than as a jaundiced hymn to their necessity.Read More »

Quote:
For my money, Abel Ferrara’s remake of a remake — namely Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, based on Don Siegel’s classically paranoid 1956 SF adaptation of Jack Finney’s effective novel The Body Snatchers — doesn’t match the Siegel original, though it’s a lot scarier and more memorable than Kaufman’s low-key, new-agey version. Kaufman shifted the action from a small California town to San Francisco, while Ferrara–shooting a script by Stuart Gordon, Dennis Paoli, and Nicholas St. John from a screen story by Raymond Cistheri and Larry Cohen — locates the action in an Army compound in Alabama. Read More »

Plot:Director Abel Ferrara applies his eccentric vision to the vampire genre with this cerebral “Art”film about graduate philosophy student Kathleen Conklin (Lili Taylor), who is bitten by anaggressive female vampire (Annabella Sciorra) and soon spirals into a nightmarish world ofblood addiction and existential angst. Driven by her merciless condition, she attacks severalof her pretentious friends and classmates (even her professor) and mainlines their blood likeheroin. Just as she becomes more bold in seeking prey on the streets of New York, she iswaylaid by a potential victim — actually a sophisticated vampire himself named Peina(Christopher Walken), who chooses to control his own blood addiction through fasting andmeditation.Read More »

Description: A mute woman gets raped twice coming home from work and decides to take matters into her own hands. She dresses suggestively and roams the streets alone, reaking vengeance upon anyone who tries to take advantage of her. Eventually her secret life spills over into her regular life in the fashion industry.Read More »

Plot:
Renowned director Andre De Toth (House of Wax) actually got permission to go into East Berlin and Moscow to film much of this pulse-pounding Cold War thriller, based on actual events. Academy Award®-winner Ernest Borgnine (1955, Best Actor, Marty) gives one of his finest performances as a Russian-born movie producer (inspired by composer Boris Morros) whose background makes him an ideal counterspy for the “CBI.” He agrees to the deception, and, aided by agent Avery (Kerwin Mathews, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad), he pretends to defect — but how long can he keep up the charade? The crackerjack cast also includes Colleen Dewhurst, Alexander Scourby, Glenn Corbett and in bit parts, Ted Knight (in his film debut) and Seymour Cassel. Newly remastered. From Warner Brothers Website!Read More »

First time writer-director James Bridges shows a pitch-perfect ear and an observant, affectionate eye in this beguiling time capsule of clashing cultures and values during the Age of Aquarius. The film is also a showcase for its luminous leading lady, the ne plus ultra of hippie goddesses, Barbara Hershey “Seagull”.

From the IMDB:
“An upper-class, childless couple in Southern California ‘hires’ a comely hippie to bear the husband’s baby (this being 1970, she conceives the old-fashioned way); soon, the straight-laced twosome are drawn into the young woman’s world. Interesting, insightful, provocative (for its time), the movie does follow a typical by-the-numbers pattern (with an ‘open minded’ boyfriend, jealousies and friction on all sides), but writer-director James Bridges is very tasteful and unhurried. He also gets some lovely shots of Barbara Hershey at her chestnut-haired, go-go-booted best (my favorites were her run across the street at the beginning, a stunning glimpse of her through a rain-soaked car window, and under the sheets in bed). The incredible finale refuses to compromise, and even though the medical aspects of the story are dated, the emotions are still on-target.”Read More »

“The three films—Unmade Beds, The Foreigner and Subway Riders—represent a kind of trilogy. The first is a European film made in New York City, a reinvention of the nouvelle vague in the context of New York. I wanted to start where Godard started, to go back to basics: innocence, romanticism, bohemianism, all the things that made up New York City for me at that time. It is the story of an artist: a medium, an ego, and a changed society. He thinks his camera is a gun, he thinks he is Belmondo, and he thinks New York is Paris. His fate is therefore doomed. So when Godard and his pals at the Cinemateque saw Sirk, Hawks, et cetera, they tried to make films like that—but they failed. Instead they created the New Wave. My attempt created a kind of New Wave in New York.”
Amos Poe, 1982
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Storyline
An honest union official named Blane is framed for the murder of another union official. Thus off the hook, the crime syndicate actually responsible for the crime is free to continue its activities. However, State’s Attorney Jim Fremont begins to suspect that Blane has been set up. Fremont launches a new investigation.Read More »