Road, Christine, Contact, and the documentary on Clarke “Alan Clarke directs.” I have these on a single dvd compilation disc, and so am upping them here as a single dvd -r rather than as separate avis. I’m told the versions of these upped already on this site are not great and hopefully these will be better. They deserve to be seen in the best form possible — criminally, they’re not in distribution.Read More »

Lonesome, middle-aged virgin Antonio Farfán is picked on and ridiculed as a matter of course, whether by coworkers or his bullying mooch of a brother (who only calls when he needs money). An employee of a notary’s office, his status improves a bit when his new boss—and strangely affable doppelganger—takes an interest in him. But Farfán’s deep-seated shyness and insecurity are only partly assuaged. And when he joins a self-improvement group, he slowly confirms what the undulating lines of this sly, involving rotoscope story suggest: everything is in motion, and change is inevitable. The question becomes what use one makes of it.Read More »

Film star Ted Crosley, fed up with movie life, quits pictures to enroll in Midland College, much to the horror of his manager Sam Lewis and his stooge-friend Willie Gumbatz. Ted wishes to enroll in school under an assumed name but Sam, hoping to nip his school plans in the bud, tips off the press and school. En route, Ted has met and fallen in love with Jean Worthington, daughter of Dean Worthington who is counting on Ted’s enrollment to save his job. Ted, as the hero of many college and football movies, is given a royal welcome when he arrives. In an effort to make the Midland football team a bigger draw and pay off the stadium debt, Ted is put on the varsity team, where, his exploits don’t match those he had on screen, and he is actually a liability. He soon incurs the enmity of Biff Gordon, the school’s football hero and Ted’s rival for Jean.Read More »

A film trapped between two monologues. A lonely and abandoned wife’s fantasy comes to life when the paramour she invokes springs forth and transforms her reality. Shadows Formless is an interpretation of the Malayalam novella Pandavpuram by the distinguished novelist Setumadhavan from Kerala.Read More »

At the beginning of the Second World War, Maria Werla, the director’s mother, was forced to leave Poland and was taken to a concentration camp in Northern Russia. Thousands of Poles faced the same fate, victims like Maria of the pact between Hitler and Stalin. Lech Kowalsky’s lifestyle and rebellious spirit also meant social rejection in New York. The film establishes a link between those marginalised in modern society and those deported in the 1940’s by drawing a parallel between his own experiences in the New York punk world and his mother’s life.Read More »

A series of interviews with living filmmakers about German film history.`Night of the filmmakers’ (1994, 52 mins., English commentary) directed by Edgar Reitz, was produced for BFI TV by Edgar Reitz Filmproduktions in association with ZDF, Arte and Premiere. Brings together an imaginary assembly of German filmmakers to explore German cinema of all periods. Contributors include Volker Schlöndorff, Helma Sanders-Brahms, Margarethe von Trotta, Frank Beyer, Wolfgang Kohlhasse, Peter Schamoni, Leni Reifenstahl, Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog.

p.s. part of the serie The Century Of Cinema for the BFIRead More »

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Chow Yun Fat’s last film in the pre-Handover Hong Kong film industry before he went on to try his luck in Hollywood, Peace Hotel was directed by regular Johnnie To collaborator Wai Ka Fai, produced by John Woo, and has the feel of a swan song. Indeed Chow Yun Fat’s next Hong Kong Cantonese-speaking film would come almost 20 years later. So it is quite suitable that his character in the film is known only as “the Killer”, echoing arguably the apex of his Hong Kong career and his legendary collaboration with John Woo. The Killer, as a gorgeous black-and-white prologue tells us, once wiped out an entire gang of horse thieves responsible for the death of his wife (Wu Chien Lien). His killing spree led him to an abandoned hotel, where after an experiencing an epiphany he spared the life of the last gang member. 10 years later, the hotel is not abandoned anymore : it has become a safe haven for fugitives and outlaws, run by the Killer himself. Read More »

The movie seethes with conflict and bad blood – often unspoken. The conflicts arise over deeply felt divisions in social class, in gender and in generation, and result in unspoken accusations of callousness and cowardice, vanity and selfishness.

In many respects this is a movie of another time – these days, unless a family has a strong military tradition, I can imagine few families now enraged by a son’s expressed wish that a war could be won without his involvement, few families in which an employer would not draft a letter for his decades-long employee’s only child to keep him out of war – and even refuse to write a letter (for which his mother pleads) for his own beloved brother’s draft deferment.Read More »

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A complex and far from straight-forward Nakahira film about a womanizer suspected to be a serial killer.Read More »