Synopsis:
Transport from Paradise is set in an unusual World War II concentration camp. The lax Nazi guards permit their Jewish prisoners to roam freely about the camp and conduct their own business and social affairs, without the threat of instant extermination looming over their heads. The prisoners’ main fear is that they may at any moment be shipped off to one of the death camps. In the film’s incredibly heartbreaking climax, a group of prisoners willingly board a train to Auschwitz, laboring under the delusion that they are being sent to another “paradise” camp at the behest of the Council of Jewish Elders. Though it stretches credibility at times, Transport from Paradise is purportedly based on a true story.Read More »

Review

(Some spoilers) This madcap “giallo” farce, directed by Giacomo Gentilomo, suggests an Italianized Howard Hawks film, complete with spitfire dialog and outrageous wacko characters. Two doctors have been mysteriously murdered. A famous mystery writer is suspected because his stories bear an uncanny resemblance to the facts of the murders. His wife is perhaps more astute than he is and is able to vindicate her husband by uncovering evidence leading to a demented woman in the clinic.

This pleasant escapist pap was a fairly successful film when it came out in wartime Italy and was an antidote to the grim reality outside the theatre for 80 minutes or so.Read More »

Quote:
Abel Ferrara’s first dramatic feature since 2014’s Pasolini reteams the filmmaker and his frequent lead Willem Dafoe, who delivers a career-best performance as the title character, an older American expat living in Rome with his young wife and their daughter. Disoriented by his past misgivings and subsequent, unexpected blows to his self-esteem, Tommaso wades through this late chapter of his life with an increasingly impaired grasp on reality as he prepares for his next film. Tommaso is easily Ferrara and Dafoe’s most personal and engrossing collaboration to date, a delicately surrealistic work of autofiction marked by the keen sensitivity of two consummate artists.Read More »

Quote:
“No es” (It isn’t) is a cumulative poem by Mariano Blatt, which is constantly written over the course of a lifetime. The text of the poem, a list of “what seems to be but isn’t”, to which verses are added over days, months, and years, can cover anything: images, people, memories, landscapes, phrases, ideas. With this list ringing in its head, Eduardo Williams’s film Parsi finds itself in a perpetual movement through spaces and around people. We are taken on a breathless ride through bustling neighborhoods, from person to person, thrown, dipped under water, rushed from image to image, creating in the process yet another poem which is caressed by, crashes into, and spins next to “No es”.Read More »

Synopsis:
The story concerns the misadventures of Wong Fei Hung as he accidentally becomes involved with the affairs of the British consul, who is smuggling ancient Chinese artifacts out of the country. Wong Fei Hung battles the henchmen of the consul using the Zui Quan (“Drunken Boxing”) style of martial arts. An added twist is that Wong Fei Hung becomes a more powerful fighter by consuming alcohol. But when he consumes too much alcohol, he becomes very sluggish, drunk, and unable to fight.Read More »

Wanting to have nothing to do with the feud that has decimated not only his family but also his neighbours’, too, an irenic teacher faces his childhood sweetheart who yearns to kill him. Can the feared she-wolf see the error of her ways?Read More »

A barrage balloon appears unexpectedly over a Bulgarian village. The startled villagers decide to knock it down with a fusillade. But the balloon flies off to the mountains. The villagers, armed to their teeth, set off after it. But they are not alone in this undertaking. There is another armed group that chases the wonder. An argument whose property the balloon is breaks out between the two groups. It turns out that the balloon flew from Romania over the Danube River. In the turmoil following the argument, the balloon is destroyed. The police arrive and punish the villagers for meddling in other peoples affairs.Read More »

Quote:
An honest man from the provinces arrives in Madrid for a living, with no more baggage than a little money and plainness. He befriends a street urchin, “The Chirri”, and both live countless urban adventures.Read More »

“Weapons of the Spirit,” Pierre Sauvage’s documentary about the extraordinary French village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon during the Nazi rule in World War II, is like a murder mystery in reverse. It’s an examination of crimes that didn’t take place, of atrocities averted, and in such a way that history itself seems to have been subverted by their absence.Read More »