Plot Synopsis
This is a stripped down (but still excellent) version of “The Brothers Karamazov.” Young Dimitri Karamasoff, on leave from the army, returns home to ask his father for money to get married. When he arrives he finds that his father has become smitten with a young woman of extremely questionable character named Gruschenka. His father gruffly rebuffs Dimitri’s request for money. Dimitri immediately seeks out his fathers lover to demand that she break off the engagement. Things get a bit more complicated when his anger towards her turns to infatuation – and eventually obsession. Dimitri and his father are both mad for Gruschenka, but she doesn’t want anything from either of them – except their money. Things come to a head when the old man is found murdered. Did Dimitri really commit patricide? Or is there more to the story?Read More »

Warner Oland makes the first of four screen appearances as Sax Rohmer’s insidious oriental Dr. Fu Manchu. The film makes an effort to explain Fu’s hatred of all whites by showing the death of the Doctor’s family during the Boxer Rebellion. Twenty years later, Fu Manchu is a full-blooded villain using a hypnotized Jean Arthur to help wipe out the British family Fu holds responsible for the deaths of his loved ones. But when Arthur falls in love with potential victim Neil Hamilton, Dr. Fu is forced to add her to his death-list. Weakened only by the excessive “silly-ass Englishman” comedy relief of William Austin, The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu is a rapid-fire adventure devoid of early-talkie clumsiness.Read More »

Synopsis:
A Russian road crew accidentally blasts open a subterranean crypt, and the captain of the road crew, fearing looters and criminals, stations a guard near the site.

Late in the night, an earthquake shakes loose one of the coffins, which slides down and lands at the feet of the confused guard. Curious as to what has fallen before him, the guard opens the coffin and discovers the body of a dog, impaled by a stake. He removes the stake, which revives the vampiric hound Zoltan.Read More »

The film covers a hundred years in the lives of the Ricordi family, the Milan publishing house of the title, and the various composers and other historic personalities, whose careers intersected with the growth of the Ricordi house. It beautifully draws the parallel between the great music of the composers, the historic and social upheavals of their times, as well as the “smaller stories” of the successive generations of Ricordi.Read More »

Quote:
Based on the Bathurst prison riots of 1974, Stir is a convincing account of a brutal jail system and almost unbelievable degree of sadism that infected the warders in their treatment of the prisoners there. Written by Bob Jewson, who was a minimum security inmate at the time, the script presents the prisoner’s point of view without bias but with a great sense of humanity creating well-drawn characters and situations that never fall into the hackneyed or melodramatic. Read More »

In the mountains of Córdoba hides a historical scar. In 1575, hundreds of Hênia-Kâmîare women, children and elders jumped off in order to avoid slavery. A free, poetic view at the very place where the largest mass suicide in the history of the territory known today as Argentina took place. The film is a phantasmagoric trip within this geographical extension, taking it as a vast, green cemetery.Read More »

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Kwaku Ananse is a traditional West African fable of a creature, part man, part spider, who spends years collecting all wisdom of the world in a wooden pot. As he tries to hide the pot in a tree he can’t find a way to place it high up in its branches. When his little son, Ntikuma shows him the way, Kwaku Ananse becomes so angry that he throws the pot down onto the ground. It bursts and the wisdom seeps away. Everyone rushes over, hoping to salvage what they can. Nyan Koronhwea returns to her father Kwaku Ananse’s native Ghana for his funeral.Read More »

The lovely Maria Teresa is unhappily married with the impotent lawyer Marcello. Maria Teresa’s marriage is contrasted by the passionate Valeria, who is killed during a chase. Is Valeria’s husband the murderer? Maria Teresa helps him…Read More »

Plot Summary
The gunfighter El Topo (“The Mole”) and his young son ride through a desert to a village, whose inhabitants have been massacred. Bandits are nearby, torturing and killing the survivors. El Topo rescues a woman (Mara), who leads him on a mission to find and defeat the four master gunmen of the desert. Leaving his son with a group of monks, El Topo and Mara complete the mission, accompanied by a mysterious woman in black. The women leave El Topo wounded in the desert, where he is found by a clan of deformed people who take him to the remote cavern where they live.Read More »