Sam Shepard’s revisionist 1994 Western, the final release featuring late actor River Phoenix, combines elements of baroque Japanese ghost films like Onibaba with traditional stylistic conventions of John Ford.

Storyline:
It’s 1873, Indian Territory. Talbot Roe is going mad with grief over losing his Indian wife, Awbonnie. In an effort to save him, his father, Prescott Roe, seeks to purchase the dead wife’s sister, Velada, from the same traveling carnival he acquired Awbonnie. The girls’ father, carnival master Eamon McCree, is willing to do business, but her step-brother, Reeves, protests, putting an end to the negotiation. Desperate, Prescott kidnaps Velada and promises her the means to be rid of her father in return for comforting Talbot out of his obsession. In Talbot’s madness, he guards his wife’s corpse, preventing her from passing to the beyond. As a result, Awbonnie’s ghost begins haunting and cursing everyone involved in the transaction of selling her as a wife. Meanwhile, Reeves and Eamon search the prairie for Velada…Read More »

Quote:
Metin Erksan’s most controversial film, Kuyu/The Well (1968), considered as one of the classics of Turkish cinema, is a rural drama that focuses on a relationship, founded on male obsession and female resistance, which culminates in tragedy.

From an artistic point of view, the film is one of the masterpieces of Turkish cinema. The minimalist narrative works in repetitions; the characters of the two protagonists who are both loners in an indifferent world are developed meticulously and with special concern for human psychology; societal dynamics are sharp; and the characters that are offsprings of such a society very accurately drawn. The photo­graphy and the camera angles are beyond reproach. However, the film’s graphic display of male brute power is controversial.Read More »

Béla Tarr’s hypnotic parable about the trials of human existence, filmed in thirty shots, is an apparently simple record of a week in the life of the farmer and pálinka distiller Ohlsdorfer. The minimalist drama opens with a brief text about the anecdote that Nietzsche went insane in 1889 in Turin after seeing a coachman brutally beat a horse. The introduction ends with the remark that we do not know what happened to the horse. The Turin Horse (2011) answers that question.Read More »

A young woman is questioned by the police and the judges, suspected of being a modern witch. The girl who shared her apartment has been found dead, and a pair of scissors impaled through her heart, as she lay attached to the bedposts. Apparently, the girl does have powers, to make all people around her fall prey to her spell, glissing progressively into desire, lust, and the unknown.Read More »

Quote:
I don’t have much patience with colleagues who dismiss Charlie Chaplin by saying that Buster Keaton was better (whatever that means). To the best of my knowledge, with the arguable exception of Dickens, no one else in the history of art has shown us in greater detail what it means to be poor, and certainly no one else in the history of movies has played to a more diverse audience or evolved more ambitiously from one feature to the next. The opening sequence in Chaplin’s second Depression masterpiece (1936), of the Tramp on the assembly line, is possibly his greatest slapstick encounter with the 20th century, and as Belgian filmmakers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne have brilliantly observed, the famous shot of his being run through machinery equates him with a strip of film. Still, there’s more hope here than in Chaplin’s preceding City Lights, perhaps because this time the Tramp has Paulette Goddard, another plucky urchin, to keep him company.Read More »

Synopsis:
A young girl of 13 lives with her mother on an isolated property. They are awaiting the return of their father and husband. But instead, another man appears, transforming the relationship between the mother and daughter.Read More »

From the DVD cover:
The beginning of the 20th century. Led by the famous Bulgarian actor Pier Stomanyakov, the travelling theatrical troupe “Obnova” arrives at a small railway station. Before the performance of Shakespeare’s Othello, the actress playing Desdemona falls ill. The young local teacher Elisaveta Strezova, in love with theatre, offers to fill in for her role. She joins the troupe and travels with the actors along the dusty country roads. There comes a point when a chosen selection of the actors, with Stomanyakov top of the list, is offered a permanent job at the municipality theatre. Elisaveta assumes the role of leader of the rest, who bear in their hearts the memory of the “starry moments” of the “Obnova” theatrical troupe and are ready to serve art with might and main.Read More »

Film shows dramatic events in a small Lithuanian village community, where people are split between the soviet supporters and the “brothers in the woods” – anti-Soviet guerrillas – who are fighting to defend their land from the Soviets after the end of the Second World War. The film story is about the revenge of the sons of a village chairman, who is killed by guerrillas. The choice to make the film following some Western genre conventions allowed Žalakevičus approach the soviet version of recent Lithuanian history in a more open and humanistic way. Nobody wanted to die – neither the father who was killed, nor the Brothers from the forest; and nobody wanted to kill, either.Read More »

Wikipedia wrote:
Folly of Love (German: Unfug der Liebe) is a 1928 German silent comedy film directed by Robert Wiene and starring Maria Jacobini, Jack Trevor and Betty Astor. While several of Wiene’s previous films had met with mixed responses, Folly of Love was universally praised by critics. The film was made at the Marienfelde Studios of Terra Film. It was Wiene’s last silent film.Read More »