Rhythmic pumping, reminiscent of steamboat pistons, accompanies the huge mechanical glass doors as they swing open and shut to accommodate a steady stream of people. Welcome to the machine! – the words beat the same rhythm in my head. And indeed, the world we have just been invited to enter does in fact resemble a futurist machine. It is a colossus of concrete and glass, with a heart deep inside, a computer heart pulsating with an endless stream of data, while hundreds of beings in its labyrinthine veins are busy or trying to keep the coursing data under control, the effort – invoking a curious language: cis, Cas, keeping and – in ocs, Tkna… (from press sheet)Read More »

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When a father gets out of prison, he comes home to his wife and two teen-age kids to pick up where he left off. That is to say, he intends to raise his kids right and continue burglarizing his way into the easy life. He joins up again with his old partner Faucon, but early on Papa’s wily son cons him into making him a partner too. The years go by, and just when the family seems poised for the big time, an obstacle pops up from a totally unexpected sector…Read More »

Narcissistic male model manipulates and exploits others for wealth and hedonism, committing murder without remorse, believing himself invincible and able to control anyone.Read More »

A henpecked New Jersey grocer makes plans to move to California to grow oranges, despite the resistance of his overbearing wife.Read More »

Plot Synopsis:
One Crowded Night, the 1940 Irving Reis crime mystery melodrama, brings a story (in true “Grand Hotel” fashion) about a group of unrelated people at a small struggling motor lodge in the Mojave Desert, and all of them have crucial events occur to them during one fateful night. Former gun moll Gladys (Billie Seward) hopes to find happiness with honest truckdriver Joe (William Haade), but her past catches up with her in the form of escaped convict Jim (Paul Guilfoyle). Lunch-counter waitress Annie (Gale Storm) allows gas station attendant Vince (Dick Hogan) to flirt with her. Young mother-to-be Ruth (Adele Pearce), on the verge of giving birth, is unexpectedly reunited with her AWOL sailor husband Mat (Gaylord Pendleton). Quack doctor Joseph (J. M. Kerrigan) tries to peddle his miracle elixir. A pair of gunmen show up to knock off Jim, a couple of MPs arrive to pick up Mat, and so it goes?.Read More »

Sam Shepard’s revisionist 1994 Western, the final release featuring late actor River Phoenix, combines elements of baroque Japanese ghost films like Onibaba with traditional stylistic conventions of John Ford.

Storyline:
It’s 1873, Indian Territory. Talbot Roe is going mad with grief over losing his Indian wife, Awbonnie. In an effort to save him, his father, Prescott Roe, seeks to purchase the dead wife’s sister, Velada, from the same traveling carnival he acquired Awbonnie. The girls’ father, carnival master Eamon McCree, is willing to do business, but her step-brother, Reeves, protests, putting an end to the negotiation. Desperate, Prescott kidnaps Velada and promises her the means to be rid of her father in return for comforting Talbot out of his obsession. In Talbot’s madness, he guards his wife’s corpse, preventing her from passing to the beyond. As a result, Awbonnie’s ghost begins haunting and cursing everyone involved in the transaction of selling her as a wife. Meanwhile, Reeves and Eamon search the prairie for Velada…Read More »

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Metin Erksan’s most controversial film, Kuyu/The Well (1968), considered as one of the classics of Turkish cinema, is a rural drama that focuses on a relationship, founded on male obsession and female resistance, which culminates in tragedy.

From an artistic point of view, the film is one of the masterpieces of Turkish cinema. The minimalist narrative works in repetitions; the characters of the two protagonists who are both loners in an indifferent world are developed meticulously and with special concern for human psychology; societal dynamics are sharp; and the characters that are offsprings of such a society very accurately drawn. The photo­graphy and the camera angles are beyond reproach. However, the film’s graphic display of male brute power is controversial.Read More »

Béla Tarr’s hypnotic parable about the trials of human existence, filmed in thirty shots, is an apparently simple record of a week in the life of the farmer and pálinka distiller Ohlsdorfer. The minimalist drama opens with a brief text about the anecdote that Nietzsche went insane in 1889 in Turin after seeing a coachman brutally beat a horse. The introduction ends with the remark that we do not know what happened to the horse. The Turin Horse (2011) answers that question.Read More »

A young woman is questioned by the police and the judges, suspected of being a modern witch. The girl who shared her apartment has been found dead, and a pair of scissors impaled through her heart, as she lay attached to the bedposts. Apparently, the girl does have powers, to make all people around her fall prey to her spell, glissing progressively into desire, lust, and the unknown.Read More »