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The Italian filmmaker Paolo Benvenuti is little known outside of Italy, although several recent festival retrospectives have begun opening the world’s eyes to this iconoclastic director. His 1992 work Confortorio is set during one long night in 1736 Rome, as a group of Catholic high priests attempts to “convert” two Jewish thieves who have been sentenced to death. “Every death has to be comforted; every soul has to be saved,” says one priest; the two stubborn thieves, however, have other plans for their (after)lives, even as their “saviors” move from religious fervor to torture.Read More »

Luring unwary victims to his remote island, Count Zaroff wines and dines them, gives them a few hours’ head start to run into the jungle, then hunts them down with rifle and bow and arrow.Read More »

The follow-up to the seminal Cat People, The Curse of the Cat People is the tale of a lonely young girl who conjures up the spirit of Irena – her father’s first wife – to provide herself with a companion. But Irena believed herself to be descended from a race of cat people, and before long the fiendish feline is on the prowl again.Read More »

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Since weeks it’s cold and wet. It’s already late, Karl Winter is on his way home. Under dark circumstances he accidentally meets a woman of mysterious fascination – Martha… And so begins a love story of fatal dynamics which throws Karl far off the tracks of reason. Wicked dreams and subliminal changes in Karl’s surroundings confirm his feelings that with Martha the uncanniness has also entered his life.Read More »

Synopsis:
Well-to-do Chicagoan, Larry Darrell, breaks off his engagement to Isabel and travels the world seeking enlightenment, eventually finding his guru India. Isabel marries Gray, and following the crash of 1929, is invited to live in Paris with her rich, social climbing, Uncle Elliot. During a sojurn there, Larry, having attained his goal, is reunited with Isabel. While slumming one night Larry, Isabel and company are shocked to discover Sophie, a friend from Chicago. Having lost her husband and child in a tragic accident, Sophie is living the low-life with the help of drugs and an abusive brute. Larry tries to rehabilitate her, but his efforts are sabotaged by Isabel who has tried in vain to reignite Larry’s interest in her.Read More »

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Li Han-Hsiang’s adaptation of the classic Qing Dynasty novel will take viewers to the heightened pleasures of love and the despairing depths of betrayal. Timeless beauty Brigitte Lin Ching-hsia appears as Chia Pao-yu in her first attempt at a gender-bending role, an art she will wield complete mastery over in later films. Pao-yu is in love with his cousin, Lin Tai-yu (Sylvia Chang), but his family has other marital plans for him that will leave both broken-hearted.Read More »

Synopsis
Sophie’s Place is a feature-length film in which Jordan used hand-painted collages that gradually transform from the Garden of Eden to the site of Hagia Sophia. It took Jordan 5 years to complete this project. Filmmaker Stan Brakhage called it “the greatest epic animated film”.
(FILMAFFINITY)Read More »

Doctors are being murdered in bizarre manners – bats, bees, a killer frog mask, etc. – which represent the nine Biblical plagues of Egypt. The crimes are orchestrated by an organ-playing, demented madman (from his home base, replete with a clockwork orchestra and help from a beautiful, mute assistant). Detectives are stumped until they find that all the slain doctors once assisted a Dr. Vesalius on an unsuccessful operation involving the wife of organist Dr. Phibes, killed in a car crash upon learning of his wife’s death. He couldn’t be the culprit, could he?Read More »

Paul Lavond was a respected banker in Paris when he was framed for robbery and murder by crooked associates and sent to prison. Years later, he escapes with a friend, a scientist who was working on a method to reduce humans to a height of mere inches (all for the good of humanity, of course). Lavond however is consumed with hatred for the men who betrayed him, and takes the scientist’s methods back to Paris to exact painful revenge.Read More »