PLOT:
Fired from Sovkino studio after A Sixth Part of the World, Vertov (and his brother-cinematographer Mikhail Kaufman and wife-assistant director Elizaveta Svilova) was soon hired by the All-Ukrainian Photo Cinema Administration. The trio’s first assignment was a documentary celebrating the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution – more or less the same kind of ode-in-pictures as Stride, Soviet! and A Sixth Part of the World. But while the political theme of The Eleventh Year may be orthodox and plain, its photography and editing are daring and complex. In the eyes of a left-wing artist of the twenties, ten years of Socialism was a radical social experiment, and as such, deserved, nay, required to be presented in a radically experimental way.Read More »

Quote:
The day-to-day routines of a seemingly ordinary Austrian family begin to take on a sinister complexion in Michael Haneke’s chilling portrait of bourgeois anomie giving way to shocking self-destruction. Inspired by a true story, the director’s first theatrical feature finds him fully in command of his style, observing with clinical detachment the spiritual emptiness of consumer culture—and the horror that lurks beneath its placid surfaces. The Seventh Continent builds to an annihilating encounter with the televisual void that powerfully synthesizes Haneke’s ideas about the link between violence and our culture of manufactured emotion.Read More »

Louis Bertain is the owner of a Paris garage which is the front for a robbery gang. He and his accomplices are careful to keep up a civic veneer by day, indulging in criminal activities only when “the red light is on” at night. This status quo is upset when one of the gang members becomes convinced that Louis’ younger brother is a police informer.Read More »

Quote:
This landmark film is a brilliant exploration of truth and human weakness. It opens with a priest, a woodcutter, and a peasant taking refuge from a downpour beneath a ruined gate in 12th-century Japan. The priest and the woodcutter, each looking stricken, discuss the trial of a notorious bandit for rape and murder. As the retelling of the trial unfolds, the participants in the crime — the bandit (Toshiro Mifune), the rape victim (Machiko Kyo), and the murdered man (Masayuki Mori) — tell their plausible though completely incompatible versions of the story.Read More »

Elvira is travelling through the French countryside with her friend Genevieve, searching for the lost tomb of a medieval murderess and possible vampire, Countess Wandessa. They find a likely site in the castle of Waldemar Daninsky, who invites the women to stay as long as they like. As Waldemar shows Elvira the tomb that supposedly houses the countess, she accidentally causes the vampire to come back to life, hungrier than ever. Daninsky has a hidden secret of his own, but will it be enough to save the two girls from becoming Wandessa’s next victims?Read More »

Quote:
Judith of Bethulia was a 1914 film and starred Blanche Sweet and Henry B. Walthall, and was produced and directed by D. W. Griffith in 1913. This was the first feature-length film made by pioneering film company Biograph, although the second that Biograph released. Shortly after its completion and a disagreement Griffith had with Biograph executives on making more future feature-length films, Griffith left Biograph, and took the entire stock company with him. Biograph delayed the picture’s release until 1914, after Griffith’s departure, so that it would not have to pay him in a profit-sharing agreement they had.Read More »

Disgruntled secretary Deidre turns to murder and blackmail after being turned down for promotion.Read More »

A dour ten minutes during which a young woman takes the job a family man. Mostly of interest as a “glimpse of views on women’s emancipation and employment at a time when they were invading the office world as stenographers and typists” (Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi).Read More »

Synopsis:
A runaway criminal breaks into an eerie chateau, taking its two frightened chambermaids hostage. As night falls, a group of mysterious aristocratic women arrive and the criminal begins to realize the women are hiding a sinister secret.Read More »