A handsome, suave Toshiro Mifune lights up the screen as painter Ichiro, whose circumstantial meeting with a famous singer (Yoshiko Yamaguchi) is twisted by the tabloid press into a torrid affair. Ichiro files a lawsuit against the seedy gossip magazine, but his lawyer, Hiruta (Kurosawa stalwart Takashi Shimura), is playing both sides. A portrait of cultural moral decline, Scandal is also a compelling courtroom drama and a moving tale of human redemption.Read More »
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Gina (Céline Lomez), a Montreal striptease dancer, is sent by her agency to small-town Louisville to give a show at a local hotel. Also arriving in Louisville that same day are Bob Sauvageau (Claude Blanchard), leader of a gang of snowmobilers known as “Les Pinguins,” and a director (Gabriel Arcand) and a small crew of filmmakers from the Office National du Cinéma who are making a film on the oppressive working conditions at the local textile factory (a reference to Arcand’s own NFB-banned documentary On est au coton). The friendly relationship that is established between Gina and the filmmakers upsets the snowmobilers, while the filmmakers, having persuaded the manager of the factory to allow them to film, are discovering a long history of alienation and submission among the workers.Read More »
An young priest commits a crime when he falls in love with a beautiful and troubled woman.Read More »
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The fifth directorial effort of German film star Maximillian Schell, Marlene is an unorthodox documentary of the legendary Marlene Dietrich. After years of resisting Schell’s entreaties, Dietrich finally agreed to participate in this project-but refused to appear on camera. Thus, a tape recording of a Dietrich-Schell interview is heard throughout, while the screen is filled with images of Marlene culled from stills, dramatic films (The Blue Angel, Shanghai Express et. al.) and newsreel footage.Read More »
Filmed during the COVID-19 lockdown, the movie is an almost absurd portrait of a family’s dynamic during the pandemic, set in directors Alejo Moguillansky and Luciana Acuña’s home and starring their real-life daughter. The Middle Ages features them taking online courses, trying to work and find moments of solitude in a perpetually full house. In essence, trying to not go completely crazy. Cleo, the 8-year-old star, is the protagonist and the one who copes best with the new crisis, as the story revolves around her trying to collect money to buy a telescope by selling the house’s objects. Moguillansky and Acuña produced a story that’s both relatable and also highly poetical and philosophical, in the playful and comedic fiction/documentary hybrid style they have mastered throughout their previous films.Read More »
That’s all I’ll ‘spoil’ if you haven’t seen this before :
…how and why the CIA and the NASA hired Stanley Kubrick in 1969 just before Apollo hits the moon…
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This hard-hitting mockumentary exposes how Stanley Kubrick faked the 1969 moon landing, with seeming-endorsements from many key players in NASA and the US government.Read More »
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While ‘Sex Psycho’ has little to no credibility as a serious piece of film-making; when it comes to exploitation cinema, this is exactly what the sort of film that we degenerates look for! Sex Psycho starts off shockingly, and then constantly builds on itself, and it’s clear that director Walt Davis made this film with the intention of going a little further every time he decides to break a taboo. The plot centres on theme of an adulterous relationship between two unscrupulous individuals. Jerry and Eva are having an affair, and decide that Eva’s husband has to go. Naturally, they decide to take on the services of Eva’s brother; and while he and the husband are having sex (…), the boyfriend comes in and graphically inserts a butcher’s knife into the husband’s throat. From there, we watch as things go from sick to sicker, with the opening homosexual sex scene being topped by a sequence that sees the wife have sex with her lover on the bed that her husband’s corpse still lies on, before an incestuous sex scene is followed by a five person orgy. Read More »
Set in 19th Century New England, the story follows the whaling ship Pequod and its crew. Leading them is Captain Ahab, who was almost killed by the “great white whale,” Moby-Dick. Now he is out for revenge. With the crew that has joined him, Ahab is out to destroy the huge mammal, but soon he learns that his obsession with vengeance is so great that he cannot turn back, eventually leading to the death of him and all save his newest able seaman, Ishmael.Read More »
Set in 1977, back when sex was safe, pleasure was a business and business was booming, idealistic porn producer Jack Horner aspires to elevate his craft to an art form. Horner discovers Eddie Adams, a hot young talent working as a busboy in a nightclub, and welcomes him into the extended family of movie-makers, misfits and hangers-on that are always around. Adams’ rise from nobody to a celebrity adult entertainer is meteoric, and soon the whole world seems to know his porn alter ego, “Dirk Diggler”. Now, when disco and drugs are in vogue, fashion is in flux and the party never seems to stop, Adams’ dreams of turning sex into stardom are about to collide with cold, hard reality.Read More »