Plot:
Athens, 1936. A German woman named Isavella, who is married to a Greek officer in the close circle around Dictator Metaxas and who is a member of a group of mysticists, falls in love with Alvertos. The latter is a blond Jewish adolescent who delivers ice. Their relationship is iheady, but it stumbles on problems of race, class and age. After their union, Alvertos disappears, and Isabella tries to bring him back with magic. She manages to succeed, but Alvertos is now a soulless person who no longer satisfies her. Overwhelmed by her passion for love, Isabella takes her own life and is reborn into a situation which brings her close to her beloved once again.Read More »

Quote
Begins with a three beat announcement drawn out in time which thereafter serves as a figure to divide the four sections. Each return of this figure is more condensed, and finally used in reverse to conclude the film.

The brothers John & James Whitney created their remarkable series of Film Exercises between 1943 and 1944. These films are visually based on modernist composition theory, the carefully varied permutations of form are manipulated with cut-out masks so that the image photographed is pure direct light shaped, rather than the light reflected from drawings as in traditional animation. Read More »

A self-pitying but popular playwright drives to Vladimir to relax with a doting female student and another writer. He’s convinced his writing is of no lasting value, but he still has an ego, about his work and his masculine appeal. He’s drawn to a museum guide he sees on his first afternoon, and when she appears at dinner, he tries charm. She reads widely, knows his work, loved it once and now finds it trivial; and she says so. He’s stung. The next day, they walk through a cemetery where she talks of a dead peasant’s poems and he grabs an idea of hers as the theme for a new play. She remains indifferent; he’s baffled. So that night he spies on her. All is revealed.Read More »

Quote:
Set amidst the eerie desolation of the Australian outback, Kiss or Kill is a superior reworking of vintage film noir materials from the veteran director Bill Bennett. Its lovers-on-the-run story focuses on Nicole (Frances O’Connor) and Al (Matt Day), a pair of petty thieves running a scam targeting married businessmen; when one of their victims accidentally dies, they flee his hotel room, absconding with his briefcase. The case contains a videotape of Zipper Doyle (Barry Langrishe), a national soccer hero, molesting a young boy; Nicole and Al soon take off for Perth, intending to blackmail Doyle — never suspecting that he, as well as the police, are already in hot pursuit. As the two make their way across the country, they leave a trail of dead bodies in their wake; both Nicole and Al begin to suspect that the other is a murderer, and as their journey continues, their paranoia only grows. A similar feeling of mistrust and dread informs virtually every interpersonal relationship in the film, effectively gnawing at our own perceptions and expectations; a stylistically aggressive picture, brimming with jump cuts and inventive camera work, its distinctive take on the noir tradition is fresh and exciting.Read More »

Sixteen-year-old Lilja and her only friend, the young boy Volodja, live in Russia, fantasizing about a better life. One day, Lilja falls in love with Andrej, who is going to Sweden, and invites Lilja to come along and start a new life.Read More »

Gustave Courbet, The Origin of his World
Gustave Courbet (1819-1877), painter of real life, the earth, and material things, was so much a part of his era he lost himself in it. He paid for this dearly: wealthy and famous in this youth, he was later obliged to chum out paintings to avoid starvation.
“Only an hour long, Romain Goupil’s 2007 documentary on Gustave Courbet, the great French 19th-century realist painter, still expands your mind and heightens your reactions, with the lucidity and grace of all the best art (and criticism). Courbet was a terrific character, a rebel from the bourgeoisie, who accomplished in paint the revolution that he couldn’t quite manage in life. A lifelong anti-clericist and socialist, he was an important figure in the Paris Commune, a political indiscretion for which he later paid dearly, with exile and bankruptcy.Read More »

Wang Shin-hong is suffering from insomnia. A fortune teller advises the Mandalay businessman, whose car and bulging wallet suggest that business is going pretty well, to spend 14 days in a monastery, living life as a monk and eating an apple a day.Read More »

Exerpts from the NY Times review December 11, 1981

To get quickly to the point, Four Friends is the best film yet made about the sixties, that harrowed time of war, prosperity, and broken promises, of turning on and dropping out to colors described as psychedelic, when establishment came to be written with a capital “E.”
Four Friends, directed by Arthur Penn and written by Steven Tesich, initially suggests a sort of big-budget The Return of the Secaucus Seven. It’s a film that embraces the looks, sounds, speech, and public events of the sixties, but not in the way of a documentary. It has the quality of legend, a fable remembered. Because Mr. Penn and Mr. Tesich see everything in terms of legend, even a tumultuously funny barroom brawl near the film’s end becomes not only a brawl but also a revivifying re-creation of all barroom brawls in all of the Western films the four friends grew up with.Read More »

Quote:
Underground is a 1976 documentary film about the Weathermen, the militant faction of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) who fought to overthrow the U.S. government during the 1960’s and 1970’s. The film consists of interviews with members of the group after they went underground and footage of the anti-war and civil rights protests during this time period. It was directed by Emile de Antonio, Haskell Wexler and Mary Lampson, who were subpoenaed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in an attempt to confiscate the film footage in order to gain information that would help them arrest the Weathermen.Read More »