Schaub and Schindelm’s documentary follows two Swiss star architects on two very different projects: the national stadium for the Olympic summer games in Peking 2008 and a city area in the provincial town of Jinhua, China. Architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron are literally building bridges between two cultures, two architectural traditions, and two political systems. Their work doesn’t simply enhance China’s great international debut, but serves the everyday needs of the Chinese population. “Bird’s Nest” presents the Basle architects as they find solutions not in the comfort of an ivory tower but in encounters and friction on the ground.Read More »

America’s mid-20th century love affair with the Biblical epic began with Mervyn LeRoy’s Quo Vadis (1951). And a new Blu-ray by Warner Home Video goes a long way to proving why that’s the case. The saturated colors and epic setpieces that dominate the film’s mise-en-scène are reason enough to sit back and enjoy the spectacle. But Peter Ustinov’s scenery-chewing performance as the last Roman Caesar, Nero, is another great justification. This film was the template for future movies of its ilk, and should be seen for that if for no other reason. Like The Robe (1953), or Ben-Hur (1959), Quo Vadis is based on a historical novel that examines the nascent religion of Christianity through the eyes of an outsider. Here it is loyal Roman commander Marcus Vinicius (Robert Taylor), who falls in love with a Christian slave, the beautiful Lygia (Deborah Kerr), while struggling to remain loyal to the increasingly mad Emperor Nero. Lygia’s entreaties for Vinicius to join her in following Christ’s teachings are initially dismissed.Read More »

Biologie! was one of very few East German feature films to address environmental issues.

In a small East German town shortly before the fall of the Wall, Ulla, a sensitive and principled 10th-grader, meets computer-obsessed Winfried, son of a chemical plant manager. On a field trip with her biology class, Ulla discovers that a trout farm and weekend homes are being built illegally in a local conservation area. The situation gets complicated when she discovers that Winfried’s family is responsible.
Ulla nevertheless passionately agitates to stop the construction project, even soliciting Winfried to help her create a touched-up photograph of a rare bird as “evidence” that the conservation area is home to an endangered species. When Ulla’s deception is discovered, she faces serious consequences.Read More »

Plot:
Blinding snow threatens to send a jetliner hurtling toward doom. But Captain Pete Douglass (David Janssen, TV’s The Fugitive) has more than a snowstorm to battle when an armed madman turns the fuselage into a shooting gallery and his fellow passengers into clay pigeons. Made in the era of Airport, The Towering Inferno and more epics of disaster, Mayday at 40,000 Feet! is piloted by three-time Emmy-winning director Robert Butler. Butler isn’t the only award recipient aboard the project: Best Actor Oscar winners** Ray Milland and Broderick Crawford are among those flying straight into peril. From Warner Brothers!Read More »

Inspired by Jacques Mesrine’s autobiographical book “L’Instinct de mort” – which he wrote in prison shortly before his magnificent final escape – Jean-François Richet’s fast-paced drama charts Mesrine’s rise from a wayward French soldier in Algeria to a bolder and bolder criminal on the streets of Paris. Mesrine’s outlaw odyssey even brought him to Canada, where he fell in with separatist radicals in Quebec. Thirty years after French police gunned him down in a spectacular shootout, his infamy lives on. Equal parts thriller and biopic, Mesrine remains faithful to its central character, a dynamic figure who is by no means a model protagonist.Read More »

The story of Jacques Mesrine, France’s public enemy No. 1 during the 1970s. An evocation of the his life, which traces the colorful career of this gangster called “the man with the hundred faces”. After nearly two decades of legendary criminal feats – from multiple bank robberies and to prison breaks – Mesrine was gunned down by the French police in Paris. The second episode of the Mesrine legend.Read More »

Third film in the Maruhi series. Focuses on the life of Buddhist nuns during the Edo Period.Junko Fuji in leading role for the first time.Read More »

Shot on location in the jungle, this gut-punching work of social realism by Mario Soffici—one of classic Argentine cinema’s foremost directors—simmers with rage against worker oppression. Desperate men are entrapped into indentured labor on a yerba maté plantation under the brutal foreman Köhner—a situation made tenser by the fact that both Köhner and a worker named Podeley love Andrea, the sweet-spirited daughter of the camp’s doctor, and that eventually boils over into an explosive rebellion led by Podeley. The expressionistic cinematography of Pablo Tabernero feverishly evokes a place where suffocating heat, economic exploitation, and cruelty lead inexorably to madness and violence.Read More »

Quote:
The race does not begin at the start line, it does not end at the finish line either. The camera observes the participants of the Polish 4×100 metres relay team, getting ready for the race and slowing down after the finish line. The competition would not exist without the following stages: mobilization, full of anxiety, and composure of the red-hot organism. Interestingly enough, they are observed really rarely. “Bieg” is a film directed by Bohdan Kosiński, a classic of the Polish school of documentary. Kosiński was associated with the Documentary Film Studios, he began his professional career with the so-called black series (“Miasto na wyspach”, 1958). Read More »