Semi-autobiographical story by Oskar Luts about friendship, love and life in a small Estonian country boarding school in the late 1800s.Read More »

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Federico Fellini returned to the provincial landscape of his childhood with this carnivalesque reminiscence, recreating his hometown of Rimini in Cinecittà’s studios and rendering its daily life as a circus of social rituals, adolescent desires, male fantasies, and political subterfuge. Sketching a gallery of warmly observed comic caricatures, Fellini affectionately evokes a vanished world haloed with the glow of memory, even as he sends up authority figures representing church and state, satirizing a country stultified by Fascism. Winner of Fellini’s fourth Academy Award for best foreign-language film, Amarcord remains one of the director’s best-loved creations, beautifully weaving together Giuseppe Rottuno’s colorful cinematography, Danilo Donati’s extravagant costumes and sets, and Nino Rota’s nostalgia-tinged score.Read More »

After his father is sent to prison, a young boy, Pierrot, is adopted by the Noblet family, who own the Mimosas boarding-house on the French Riviera. Pierrot grows up to become a small-time crook and extorts money from his adopted family. He then becomes caught up in a frenzied love triangle with his mistress Nelly and the Noblet’s daughter Louise.Read More »

Third-billed Lee Marvin dominates the proceedings in A Life in the Balance. Marvin plays a psycho killer, whose trail is dogged by inquistive young Jose Perez. Jose’s father, musician Ricardo Montalban, has been accused of a series of murders. The boy is convinced that Marvin is the guilty party, and trails the man in hopes of bringing him to justice. No dummy he, Perez leaves a trail for the authorities to follow–a series of smashed-up police call boxes (a similar plot device was deployed for comic purposes by Harold Lloyd in Professor Beware). A Life in the Balance was filmed on location in Mexico City, with a great deal of screen time devoted to a colorful carnival.
Hal Erickson, All Movie GuideRead More »

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‘Adam and Evelyn’ tells the story of a couple, from the summer to the winter of 1989. It begins in the provinces of East Germany. When Evelyn catches Adam cheating on her, she leaves for Hungary on holiday. Adam travels after her. When Hungary opens its border to Austria, Evelyn wants to cross. And so Adam ends up in the West, without ever wanting to leave.

The film is based on the novel by Ingo Schulze ‘Adam und Evelyn’ which was translated into more than 10 languages.Read More »

Following a series of films questioning commitment and politics in America and culminating with Milestones 1975, and a 1977 documentary on Lisbon’s Carnation Revolution, Scenes from the Class Struggle in Portugal, Robert Kramer moved to France with his family. The first film he made there was Guns, an intricate feature which echoed the paranoid films of 1970’s Hollywood. With Guns, Kramer continues his exploration of the militant psyche, while at the same time experimenting with different forms of narration.Read More »

This is a remake of Charade with Cary Grant and done with a few twists that make it interesting. A well to do couple in Paris are headed for divorce. The woman finds out her husband is dead before she gets the chance to ask for the divorce. She finds this out when she returns to their residence to find everything in it is gone. Two members of the French police are there and inform her of her husbands death. She encounters several people who want money stolen by her husband.Read More »

The fight for the freedom of Loyalist Spain during the 1936-39 civil war pitted an International Brigade of 35,000 civilian soldiers from more than 50 nations against the well-equipped insurgents of Generalissimo Francisco Franco. Aid to Franco came via Italian fighter planes from Mussolini and from the Nazi Condor Legion of Junker bombers sent by Hitler, who wanted to try out his new weaponry in anticipation of the larger war to come. Spurred by their government s failure to aid Spanish democracy, 2,800 American volunteers fought with distinction in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade within the international volunteer army. Read More »

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“Fatma of the Forest”, documentary,reflects life, longings and a major “fear” in the subconscious of a 12-years old “woodcutter” girl living under very hard conditions in the forest of Toros Mountains at an altitude of approximately 2000 m. The documentary, aiming to symbolize a little-known but common practice of child labour, accomplishes a dramatic portrayal of laborers who work for Ministery of Forestry totally deprived of social security.Read More »