Young girl, born and raised in an isolated farm, is brought to a small town to live with her cousins, her only relatives. Once in town, she encounters great difficulty adapting to city life.Read More »

A very rare ATG distributed Wakamatsu, starring Ken Yoshizawa and Rie Yokoyama as two pieces of a destructive love-triangle. Has all the usual Wakamatsu themes of politics, suicide and twisted love, as well as stylish Hideo Ito cinematography and great use of the more or less single set (a beach with an abandoned boat on it).Read More »

imdb comment : Racial and sexual tensions haunt a Southern plantation. Hilariously overwrought Eurotrash sex-n-violence fest is apparently part of the notorious, ubiquitous Emmanuelle series in name only, sharing none of the stars or characters of the main series, which is fine, because this then comes across as a wild-n-wooly little nothing that stands brilliantly on its own. The premise itself is classic: a Mandingo-like Southern plantation romp filmed in Italy, replete with bitch-nymphos, black slaves with huge afros, white landowners with bad hats and mustaches, slave rape, bathtub masturbation, slave torture, black-n- white love, etc. The two “Emanuelles” (Maria Luisa Longo, Rita Manna) are both pretty homely. Read More »

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Guillaume Nicloux’s Valley of Love drops audiences in the more than appropriately named Death Valley, which ultimately functions not only as the perfect mirror for the film’s official title, but as the most suitable setting for the interaction between two cinematic giants. It’s as if the landscape had opened itself up into an unadorned crater of a stage to allow Isabelle Huppert and Gérard Depardieu to mingle with one another. They star as a divorced couple named Isabelle and Gérard—a humble acknowledgement from Nicloux that any attempt to forget the stature of these actors will be futile. Isabelle and Gérard haven’t seen each other in a long time, but they’ve reunited in California at the behest of their recently deceased son, Michael, who left them letters before he committed suicide intimating that they forge a reunion and that, if they follow his guidelines, he would reappear to them.Read More »

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Raúl Ruiz’s City of Pirates is (de)composed under the sign of Surrealism, with its trust in ecstasy, scandal, the call of the wild, mystification, prophetic dreams, humour, the uncanny. Given the surprising swerves and disorientations evoking Buñuel and Dalí, and the confidence in a poetic discourse recalling Eluard and Péret, one wonders if Ruiz didn’t elaborate his scenario using the Surrealist mode of automatic writing. Troubled, graceful Isidore – Ducasse and Duncan? – is a purely Surrealist heroine, part Ophelia, Salomé, Bérénice, prone to trances, somnambulism, hysterical seizure, contact with the ‘other side’. Her calm violence links her to the real life murderesses – Germaine Berton, the Papin sisters – exalted by Breton’s circle, and by Jacques Lacan. Indeed, Lacan’s notion of a psychoanalysis in which the analyst stays off his patient’s wavelength, inspired by the idea of ‘surrealist dialogue’ in which paired monologues at cross purposes strike sparks of meaning off each other, underpins the scatty trajectory of Ruiz’s own graphomania, snared this time as the tale of a Pirate’s City.Read More »

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It’s supposed to be a political critique of the japanese patriarchal family structure. The father wearing his military uniform is dominating his family sexually and violently. And while his daughter keeps saying that everything is normal, nothing is normal in this family.Read More »

Back from the Civil War, Johnny Hamilton learns that his father was murdered by Santana the bandit and that his mother Gertrude married his uncle Claude but Johnny is determined to find out the truth.Read More »

STYLE WARS has become an emblem of the original, embracing spirit of hip hop as it exploded into the world from underground tunnels, uptown streets, clubs and playgrounds. New York’s legendary kings of graffiti own a special place in the hip hop pantheon. This film is regarded by many as the definitive document of the emerging hip hop culture, and the continuing struggle to keep its authentic spirit alive.Read More »

Visionary scientist Janos Rukh convinces a group of scientists and supporters to mount an expedition to the African continent to locate and study an ancient meteorite of great significance. He exposes himself to the highly toxic radiation of the meteorite, and while an antidote devised by Dr. Benet saves him from death by radiation poisoning, his naked touch causes instant death to others. Back in London, the benefits of the meteorite’s controlled radiation offer Dr. Benet an opportunity to restore eyesight to the blind. The antidote’s toxicity excites Prof. Rukh into paranoid rages as he seeks revenge against the members of his expedition, who he accuses of stealing his discovery for their own glory.Read More »