From RaiPlay:
“L’uomo dal Fiore in Bocca”, a single act by Luigi Pirandello staged for the first time in 1922, is one of the most intense plays by the great Nobel prize-winning playwright. It’s a dialogue at a coffee station between a man with a tumor and a dull and indifferent customer. The director of this difficult television adaptation of 1993 of the play by Pirandello is Marco Bellocchio, while the protagonist is Michele Placido, flanked by Antonino Bellomo.Read More »
Synopsis:
The story of a once-respectable woman who re-encounters her first love, now a successful doctor. Reduced to nude-dancing in a sleazy dive, with a son to support, Evelyne (Edwige Feuillère) borrows money at an outrageous interest rate in order to create a facade of respectability–and, it goes without saying, Georges falls in love with her all over again. But how can Evelyne maintain her bourgeois value and save son and “father” from the consequences of her fall?Read More »
A man discovers an ancient Incan formula for raising the dead, and uses it for a series of revenge murders.
Letterboxd review
★★★½ Watched by Lou (rhymes with wow!) 22 Jun 2021
Deliciously gothic and weirdly erotic, Death Smiles on a Murder is a wonderful slice of Joe D’Amato bizarreness. The movie has an almost dream-like quality to it, which had me clueless as to what exactly was unfolding on screen. All I know for certain is that when you give Klaus Kinski some beakers you’ll end up with magic. Also, there is no such thing as too many cat jump scares.
I got to search out some more Ewa Aulin movies.Read More »
The Tsar Alexandre II meets a young student, Katia. He understands that he loves her and try to send her away but they end up seeing each other again and becomes his mistress. With the help of Katia, Alexandre prepares a liberal constitution, but these reforms make him hostile to the more privileged subjects without satirising the revolutionaries against the regime.Read More »
Synopsis:
Brutus is convinced by a scheming band of Roman senators, led by Caius Cassius, that his dear friend Julius Caesar intends to dissolve the republic and install himself as monarch, and he joins a conspiracy to assassinate him. Brutus stirringly defends his actions, but when Mark Antony responds with a speech that plays upon the crowd’s love for their fallen leader, a battle between the two factions is assured.Read More »
A young Jewish man pretends to be Iranian to avoid being executed in a concentration camp.
(imdb)Read More »
Quote:
The end of the 1950s brought a new phenomenon to the music hall, rock music. It was fresh young rock stars who drew the crowds now, not traditional artistes like acrobats, jugglers or ventriloquists. A conjuror fears that his is a dying art. Unable to find work in Paris, he packs up his doves and heads for London, but he has no luck here either. He is reduced to appearing in small theatres, at garden parties or in cafés. Whilst performing in a village pub on the west coast of Scotland, he meets Alice, a young woman who will change his life forever…Read More »
In Painter, McCarthy, decked out in a blonde wig, a bulbous drinker’s nose, and giant latex hands, staggers around a small, wood-paneled studio with an immense paint brush, yammering things like, “I can’t do it, I can’t do it,” and, “DeKooning, DeKooning, DeKooning.” He punctures the sides of gigantesque tubes of paint (one is labeled “Shit”), mixes the paint, then slashes and hacks big crude Expressionist swaths onto canvases with crazy electric blue and orange grounds. During the course of the video, he meanders between adjoining rooms ranting against his dealer, sitting in on an absurd conversation with pretentious, bulbous-nosed scholars, has a sycophantic collector sniff his asshole, and chops off his own fingers with a cleaver. Painter is a hilarious satire of inflated Abstract Expressionists and the art world in general, but it is not only that. When McCarthy obsessively mixes his gallons of shit-brown paint, loads up his brush, and, grunting and waving, goes to his canvas, he is pointing towards something important: that paint is the same as shit and dirt—just unruly filth that flows and stains. That finally, the hopeless drive to make art is drunken, humiliated, violent, sexual and infantile, perhaps tragic as well. (Brooklyn Rail)Read More »
We are in Santiago, Chile, in a bar. Two old men talking and drinking. It seems that one of them is writing a novel. In bizarre conversation, they speak of themselves as if they were already dead while the would-be novelist, Don Federico, dips match sticks with tweezers into his wine glass. A curious strangeness settles in… where are we, exactly? In the kingdom of the dead? Not quite. At most, in a previous life or in memory. For Don Federico begins to evoke the days of his youth back when he lived in the country.Read More »