School teacher Janet Brooks innocently involves herself in a scandal while spending the week-end alone in the mountain cabin of her fiancée, Dr. Walter Phillips. She gives first aid to a wounded racketeer, Joe Bruno, who is running out on his mob with eighty thousand dollars in cash. Unknown to Janet, Bruno hides the money in the cabin. She goes on an errand and two mobsters, Ed Somers and “Stubby” Moore), make a call on Bruno and then depart after delivering a couple of soon-to-be-fatal gunshot wounds. Bruno manages to get to the highway and hitches a ride from a passing motorist who drives him to the Coniston hospital. In front of a number of doctors as witnesses, Bruno draws up a will leaving the eighty-thousand bucks to Janet, but dies before he can reveal where the money is located.Read More »

Quote:
Bricks are manufacured in Africa, India and Europe and used to erect clinics, children’s homes, schools and residential buildings. Harun Farocki observed the different steps of the manufacturing process. Bricks are cast, fired or pressed by hands, machines or robots. Depending on the country of production, this involves a single worker or a large group. The film’s title communicates a decisive aspect: Farocki merely offers material to the viewer, who has to draw the actual comparisons between traditional, early industrial, and fully industrialized societies himself. Read More »

Threnody is a somber but luminous progression through a delicate articulation of earthly phenomena… an offering to a friend who died. It is the second of two devotional songs, the first being The Visitation. These two films were preceeded by a series of Four Cinematic Songs: Triste, Variations, Arbor Vitae, and Love’s Refrain.Read More »

Synopsis
The Tavianis’ adaptation of Goethe’s novel may seem strangely restrained compared to their other fables, but it’s still a work of exquisite elegance and precision. Set in Tuscany during the Napoleonic era, it charts the forces of attraction and repulsion that shape the complex relationships between a happily married baron and his wife (Anglade, Huppert), the baron’s architect friend (Bentivoglio) and the wife’s goddaughter (Gillain). If the story itself (engrossing enough) never seems very much more than an unusually formal period romance, the immaculate performances and the Tavianis’ masterly control of colour, composition and music (a poignant but unexpectedly modernist score from Carlo Crivelli) make for absorbing viewing.Read More »

The great unknown masterpiece of mid-century Australian cinema, Clay is unlike anything made in the country before or since. The story of the film is really the sad story of Mangiamele’s career; shown to acclaim at Cannes, no local distributor would show the film, so the director was forced to hire a cinema in Melbourne to screen it himself. There are many influences here, but to me it evokes New Wave cinema from Eastern Europe as much as anything else. Don’t expect great dialogue, or great acting, and there are profound technical issues (the poor sound synch is typical of Mangiamele’s work, but he never had any money for post-production, to the extent that his earlier feature Il Contratto exists only in silent form with no soundtrack at all). But it is a deeply philosophical film, crammed with evocative imagery, and above all the extraordinary cinematography in high contrast (almost Tarr-esque) monochrome is miraculous. And it will be even more evocative for those who know the Montsalvat artist community near Melbourne, where much of the film was shot.Read More »

A Jean-Luc Godard film about politics and the media, in which two workers in a newspaper plant attempt to make a film.Read More »

Quote:
Elena, a young Brazilian woman, travels to New York with the same dream as her mother, to become a movie actress. She leaves behind her childhood spent in hiding during the years of the military dictatorship. She also leaves Petra, her seven year old sister.

Two decades later, Petra also becomes an actress and goes to New York in search of Elena. She only has a few clues about her: home movies, newspaper clippings, a diary and letters. At any moment Petra hopes to find Elena walking in the streets in a silk blouse.Read More »

Lady lawyer Portia Merryman (Frieda Inescourt) defends woebegone Elizabeth Manners (Heather Angel), who is on trial for shooting her lover Earle Condon (Neil Hamilton). Ironically, Portia herself had once had an affair with Earle’s father, powerful publisher John Condon (Clarence Kolb). She has a pretty good idea of what is going on in Elizabeth’s head, since she herself was on the verge of killing Condon when he ruthlessly took custody of her illegitimate son (not Earle, though that certainly would have brought things full circle). As Portia toils and strains to free her client, she carries on a romance with Dan Foster (Walter Abel) — the attorney for the prosecution. LA Law and The Practice have nothing on this one!Read More »

Plot Synopsis by Hal Erickson
The always reliable Griffith Jones is afforded the leading role in the British Account Rendered. Jones plays a victim of circumstance, accused of murdering his wife Ursula Howells. With the police breathing down his neck, Jones endeavors to prove his innocence. He is aided in this effort by the lovely Honor Blackman (“Pussy Galore” in Goldfinger and the first female star of the long-running TVer The Avengers).

Account Rendered is based on a novel by Pamela Barrington.Read More »