Alfonso, Eduardo and Cristina get lost when visiting a forest. A strange monk finds them and takes them to an ancient convent. There, the three amigos suffer personality changes, specially Cristina who tries to seduce Alfonso in a strange coincidence to a story told by an old monk. After some efforts to escape, Alfonso is trapped inside a jail and more strange and macabre situations happen.Read More »
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David Cronenberg’s “Eastern Promises” opens with a throat- slashing and a young woman collapsing in blood in a drugstore, and connects these events with a descent into an underground of Russians who have immigrated to London and brought their crime family with them. Like the Corleone family, but with a less wise and more fearsome patriarch, the Vory V Zakone family of the Russian mafia operates in the shadows of legitimate business — in this case, a popular restaurant.Read More »
This highly acclaimed mini series traces the course of the U.S. Civil War from the abolitionist movement through all the major battles to the death of President Lincoln and the beginnings of Reconstruction. The story is mostly told in the words of the participants themselves, through their diaries, letters, and Visuals are usually still photographs and illustrations of the time, and the soundtrack is likewise made up of war-era tunes played on period instruments. Several modern-day historians offer periodic comment and insight on the war’s causes and events.Read More »
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Das sind die Gewitter in der Natur is a fragment of a long gone time. A time that should not be forgotten. Following Wenzel Heindl, a former farmhand who was 80 years old at the time of the shooting. Hobbles through the ruins of his past and is given all the time he needs to tell stories from his life, dominated by war and poverty. It is a very personal film for Werner Fritsch because the paths of the two crossed on the farm of Werner’s parents and Wenzel was an important figure for him in his childhood. As Fritsch himself writes, he heard all kinds of stories from Wenzel and thus learned from him not only how to speak but especially how to tell. A craft that shaped Werner’s life as a writer and filmmaker. It’s not surprising that Werner Fritsch created such an impactful film already 20 years before he began his magnum opus Faust Sonnengesang series.Read More »
Review from TimeOut:
Shot in Paris, it chronicles a couple of distracted days in the life of Orlando (Miranda), an American sports journalist, during which her near-incestuous obsession with her late brother finally prompts her French lover to pack his bags and split. Little else happens: she misses a deadline (Scott Thomas cameos as her editor), meets a basketball team in their locker room and replays some of her brother’s old smell-o-vision software (designed by Chris Marker). But Shamberg uses digital editing to seamlessly integrate her memories/fantasies and larger reflections on the film’s themes into the minimal narrative, generating images of uncommon density and beauty and turning the film into a kind of nervous rhapsody. The ending consolidates the various levels of paradox, bringing us back to earth with an elegiac bump.Read More »
A woman in her flooded kitchen thinks of Ophelia and death by drowning. A nun wonders about her vocation. A girl, dumb by choice, walks around in Naples. A ballerina in a wheelchair. Three youths around a bonfire in a little island. A man secluded in a tower waiting for the end of the world. And many other stories.Read More »
Description
Dante and his girlfrend Micky run a very profitable drug operation in a seaside town, aided and abetted by a host of teens who sell the smack at discos around town, as well as by Lucas, a corrupt cop who’s on the take. Their downfall comes when they suspect one of the boys, Pep, of ripping them off, and his accidental death causes disloyalty among the teens, who suspect Dante offed them. All of this is perfect for the return of Gabriel, a one-time partner of Dante, who has just been released from jail, and has an almost angelic demeanor and the certainty that he can fix everyone’s lives.Read More »
Germany 1934: The Nazi authorities in Hamburg need an executioner to put a group of political prisoners to death, otherwise Hitler won’t visit their town. Teetjen, the butcher, facing bankruptcy, agrees to do the dirty deed.
Adapted from the novel by German-Jewish author Arnold Zweig and co-scripted by Wolfgang Staudte (director of The Murderers Are Among Us, Rotation and The Kaiser’s Lackey) this important classic was directed by a former anti-Nazi resistance fighter, Falk Harnack.
Ironically the film, which starred concentration camp survivor Erwin Geschonneck in the lead role, was withdrawn after its release because its nuanced portrait of a Nazi perpetrator was considered too sympathetic.Read More »
