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That the critics baptized the wave which emerged at this time as the “new Swiss cinema” simply reflects the fact that the “old” Swiss cinema was unknown to the cinema-going public. Today, the appeal and energy of this first film remain undiminished, magnified by the exceptional stature and presence of François Simon and the sublimely uncluttered camera work of Renato Berta. Tanner drew his subject matter from what he saw of the events of May ’68 in Paris, which he covered for Swiss television. Unimpressed by the ideological pronouncements of the young demonstrators (Tanner was nearly 40 and mistrustful of the siren songs of militancy), he was more struck by the elderly people marching alongside them.Read More »

Synopsis:
Japanese pink film in Nikkatsu’s Roman Porno series starring Asami Ogawa and directed by Masaru Konuma. Ogawa’s debut film, this was the seventh and last entry in the Office Lady Journal series, which had been launched in 1972 with Office Lady Journal: Scent Of Female Cat. In their Japanese Cinema Encyclopedia: The Sex Films, the Weissers write, “This film is a perfect end to the series. Konuma is the master of free-form, rambling cinema. He manages to make ordinary life seem extraordinary with moments of kinkiness (i.e., the eroticism of a sex scene with Ms. [Aoi] Nakajima wearing a full kimono dress; or another segment where Asami is making love in a room full of baby chicks).”
— From wikipedia.Read More »

Synopsis:
The story concerns the romance between Carmela and Antonio. Faced with the hostility of their parents, they symbolically shed themselves of all responsibilities to others in a climactic act of stark-naked bravado.Read More »

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A young opera-loving mailman, Jules, becomes inadvertently entangled in murder, when a young woman fleeing two mob hit men drops an incriminating cassette into his mailbag. Jules has just recently recorded opera star Cynthia Hawkins’ latest concert, something of a coup as Hawkins refuses to make recordings of any kind. Soon Jules finds himself the target of the hit men, who want the voice recording, and also of another couple of ominous and mysterious agents.Read More »

Utu is the Maori word for “Retribution,” which sums up the chief motivating factor of this New Zealand-produced drama. Set in the 1870s, the film details the exigencies of British Colonial rule. A Maori scout, Te Wheke (Anzac Wallace), stumbles across a native village that has been destroyed in a British raid. Since it is the scout’s own village, he deserts the British army, the better to seek “utu.” Leading a vigilante force consisting of his fellow Maoris, Te Wheke kills as many British settlers as he can get his hands on. The feverish conviction of his crusade is in stark contrast to the attitudes of the British, who seem more concerned with material possessions than with human beings. Popular down under star Bruno Lawrence is cast as a vengeance-driven settler who makes it his personal mission in life to end Te Wheke’s reign of terror.Read More »

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In cinematic enfant terrible Jean-Claude Brisseau’s latest outing, “A l’aventure,” the explicit eroticism of his recent oeuvre topples over into outright porn — not because of graphic sex scenes, but rather due to a plot of unalloyed ludicrousness. Granted, levitating 14th-century Flemish nuns rep an inventive step up from randy milkmen, but Brisseau’s humorless intellectual pretentions founder in very shallow waters. Skedded for an April 1 release in France, pic was pre-bought by IFC Stateside, where its Playboy-ish presentation of elegantly writhing naked women brought to ultimate orgasm, combined with disquisitions on the more cosmological Big Bang Theory, might attract horny eggheads.Read More »

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In the sporting world, bullfighting remains the epitome of contradiction, where grace begets gore and patience rewards ego. Such unsettling dichotomies haunt Francesco Rosi’s The Moment of Truth, a dangerously alive film that jumps down from the stands and into the ring where Spanish toreros dance a prolonged tango with beasts whose one instinct is to gorge whatever body part they can. In an attempt to grasp a sense of immediacy from convention, Rosi leans heavily on a gripping hand-held aesthetic, seemingly pinning his fluid camera to the flamboyant garb of his strutting protagonists as they tempt fate on a daily basis. While much of The Moment of Truth can be surmised within a very generic sports-genre arc (rise and fall, temptation of riches), this is most definitely a film that lives and breathes in the details of experience, and it’s hard not to admire its unabashed dedication to controlled chaos and incompleteness despite the difficult subject matter.Read More »

All Movie.com Plot Synopsis by Hal Erickson
With Mon Oncle Antoine, actor Jean Duceppe established himself as Canada’s principle purveyor of eccentric relatives. Playing the uncle of 15-year-old Jacques Ganon, Duceppe acts as the lad’s confidante through the difficult coming-of-age process. The Canadian backwoods and the mining-town milieu of the 1940s are displayed to excellent nostalgic advantage in this retrospective piece from writer/director Claude Jutra (who also plays a supporting role). Though relatively unknown in the states (and often dismissed as unremarkable by below-the-border critics), Mon Oncle Antoine is regarded as a classic of the Canadian Cinema. The film won an unprecedented eight statuettes at the 1972 Canadian Film Institute Awards, including best picture and best director.Read More »

Several survivors of a torpedoed ship find themselves in the same boat with one of the men who sunk it.
In the Atlantic during WWII, a ship and a German U-boat are involved in a battle and both are sunk. The survivors from the ship gather in one of the boats. They are from a variety of backgrounds: an international journalist, a rich businessman, the radio operator, a nurse, a steward, a sailor and an engineer with communist tendencies. Trouble starts when they pull a man out of the water who turns out to be from the U-boat.Read More »