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Bae Yonggyun is one of the most mysterious figures in the history of Korean cinema. He made two films on his own outside the film industry and then retreated to live largely in seclusion. This highly meditative film, deeply rooted in history and memory, is one of the highlights of New Korean Cinema. It follows a man who returns to his hometown after living overseas for many years. He roams like a sleepwalker through the bleak town, getting into conversations with people who could be dead or alive. An extraordinary ‘ghost story’ unprecedented in Korean cinema. (Un-seong Yoo, Sight and Sound December 2022 issue)Read More »

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Wild Reeds (Les Roseaux Sauvages) 1994- André Téchiné’s coming-of-age drama, set in a quiet provincial town in 1962, is the best French film in years. The young characters are all deeply confused about their political, intellectual, and sexual identities; the director sets up their conflicts with masterly ease, and, using smooth, complex tracking shots, carries them toward resolutions that are tentative but real. The movie flows like a river. Téchiné simply takes his characters from one point to another-from juvenile ignorance to a place where they can see themselves, and others, a little more clearly-and he makes that short journey look momentous. Few movies dealing with teen-agers have been so accurate about the moral and emotional urgency of adolescents’ attempts to understand their lives, or so forgiving of their failures. Gaël Morel, élodie Bouchez, Stéphane Rideau, and Frédéric Gorny play the main characters, and they’re all terrific.Read More »

A portrait documentary about the legendary Fay Presto; the UK’s most in-demand close-up and cabaret magician who would rather die on stage than quit performingRead More »

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Szulkin based his script on the themes of a folk parable. In a gloomy castle lived alone its owner, whose gaze had a strange and terrible power – it brought death. One day an old nobleman and his daughter, having lost their way, came to the castle. Soon the maiden became the wife of the lord of the castle…Read More »

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Dalila is married to Marcolino, a jeweller in a small provincial town. She is not getting younger. The life she leads leaves her frustrated.
Dalila’s husband is violent. She’s had enough. She decides to give herself a provocative make-over.
And provocative she becomes. Quickly, she finds herself a lover. And then announces that she has to have an operation for breast cancer. In fact, she’s having cosmetic surgery. She thinks her breasts are too small.Read More »

Kinema Jumpo “Best movie”-winner of 2000.

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Veteran director Shinji Somai lensed this heart-warming family drama about a shabby looking coot claiming to be the father of an elite salaryman. Hiroshi Nirasaki (Koichi Sato) is a securities broker desperately trying to keep the fact that his company is about to go belly-up from his high-strung upper-class wife (Yuki Saito). One day, while walking home from a particularly bad day at work, he gets accosted by an old bum (Tsutomu Yamazaki) who demands to be taken in by his son. Though his mother told him that his dad died when he was born, the drunken geezer knows enough about him and his short order cook mother (Sumiko Fuji) that he is almost convinced. Read More »

IMDB Synopsis
A notorious outlaw being escorted to prison by a homesteader and his wife turns
out to have satanic powers. He uses them on the man’s wife to try to possess her
and help him escape.
TV version of “3:10 to Yuma” except the arch villain seems to have Svengali-like
powers, and his gang are Native Americans. Nice cast of actors filmed in real
locations, but demon-wannabe Gene Barry looks more like a 70’s pimp with his
bad-ass medallion and leather suit. The movie just doesn’t possess the necessary
outright deviltry as found in, for example, the TV Satan-western “Black Noon”
made the same year. Might raise more chuckles than hackles.Read More »

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The distinguished German writer Uwe Johnson (1934-1984) lived for several years in the 1960s on Manhattan’s Upper Westside. His publisher, Harcourt Brace, had hired him as a textbook editor for their German-language school book editions, which allowed him to stay in New York and also tend to his own writing. In his spare time he got to know his neighborhood very well, observing the goings on in the streets, cafeterias, and parks. In 1968 German Television agreed to coproduce a film with us in which Uwe Johnson would, on-camera, introduce and question the various characters with whom he exchanges news and opinions on his wanderings on the Upper West Side. We proposed to him that he participate in the documentary. Being essentially introverted he was not interested in the on-camera concept, but was willing to make a list of places and situations that he felt should be included in the film. Christian Blackwood took charge of the project. Johnson wrote the narration once the film was edited. It was broadcast in Germany at the time.Read More »

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A would-be novelist with no ideas of his own mines the tragedies of an unsuspecting woman to his advantage in this drama. Robert (Ulrich Matthes) is a college professor and struggling writer living in Konstanz, a town in Southern Germany. Robert has been working on a novel for years, but beyond a rough idea about life in Germany before the Berlin Wall came down, he has no worthwhile ideas and doesn’t have much to show for his efforts; as Robert edges into his mid-forties, he’s begun to worry his literary career will never get off the ground. Robert happens to meet a young woman named Inga (Anna Maria Muehe) who was raised by her grandparents after her mother died soon after she was born; Robert senses there’s something in her story that would make for a good novel, and he begins drawing her out, trying to find out more about her and her childhood that he can use as source material for his book. As Robert digs deeper, it becomes clear he’s learned a few things about Inga’s past that she doesn’t know — and not everything she’s been told about her mother is the truth. Novemberkind (aka November Child) was the first feature film from writer and director Christian Schwochow.Read More »