Scripted (but not directed) by Ingmar Bergman, Best Intentions is a multilayered backwards glance at the courtship of Bergman’s own parents. Henrik Bergman (Samuel Froler) is a struggling theology student in the year 1909. His intended, Anna Aakerbloom (Pernilla August, who married director Bille August while the film was in progress) is from a well-to-do family. Despite the expected class differences and personality clashes, love-or at least mutual understanding-prevails. But after a harsh, spare few years as the wife of a clergyman, Anna yearns for the more bountiful pleasures of her family home. Bergman writes himself into the proceedings as a mewling infant. The current three-hour theatrical version of Best Intentions (original title: Den Goda Viljan) was simultaneously prepared as a six-hour TV miniseries, which ran in Europe, Scandanavia, and Japan.Read More »

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In a murder trial, the defendant says he suffered temporary insanity after the victim raped his wife. What is the truth, and will he win his case?Read More »

Veteran director Juzo Itami who — shot to fame with his sharply satirical Ososhiki and Tampopo — turns to decidedly sweeter fare in this melodrama about the life of a mentally handicapped young man and his devoted sister after their famous novelist father and housewife mother go to Australia on a business trip. Adapted from the novel by Nobel Laureate and brother-in-law to Itami, Kenzaburo Oe, the film centers on Iyo (Atsuro Watabe) — a brain damaged lad who is a gifted musician — and his artist sister Ma-chan (Hinako Saeki), who slowly learn about the darker, more complicated life outside their idyllic home. One catalyst in this transition is Arai-kun (Masayuki Imai) who at first seems like not only the perfect swim instructor for Iyo — he’s kind and patient — but also the perfect boyfriend for Ma-chan. Unfortunately, Arai-kun has a darker side, which comes out in unfortunate ways. Itami’s wife, Nobuko Miyamoto, also appears. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie GuideRead More »

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Like fellow Dutchmen Paul Verhoeven and Jan De Bont, Rene Daalder was drafted by Hollywood to make genre films, though his inclinations ran a little artier. Daalder achieved some cult success with the 1976 drive-in classic Massacre At Central High; then Russ Meyer asked him to work on the star-crossed Sex Pistols movie Who Killed Bambi? Newly infatuated with punk rock, Daalder struck up a friendship with Tomata Du Plenty, leader of the theatrical L.A. synth-punk act The Screamers. Throughout the first half of the ’80s, Daalder and Du Plenty tried and failed to get multiple music-video projects off the ground, until in 1986, they finally released Population: 1, a quasi-science-fiction art-punk musical cobbled together from pieces of footage Daalder shot with Du Plenty over the years, cleverly layered with the help of state-of-the-art image-manipulation effects.Read More »

Using satire, encoded in symbolism and surrealism, the French director Armand Gatti tells the story of an imaginary country in Latin America governed by Admiral Anastasio. In this setting, Cristóbal, a foreign sailor, and Julio Bobadilla, a black peasant convinced of the importance of the organ music from Manzanillo to stimulate the revolution, become the leaders of a social movement that plans to overthrow the tyrant to the rhythm of conga.Read More »

“Vulgar, excessive, melodramatic and self-indulgent: Tchaikovsky’s music is indeed all of these things, yet gloriously so, and the same goes for Ken Russell at his freewheeling best. The director’s first composer biopic for the cinema approaches Tchaikovsky’s scores as the expression of extreme emotional turmoil.”

The Music Lovers is about Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, feverishly wrapping his music around his childhood, his career, his sexuality, and his marriage into a tangle.Read More »

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Given Robert Altman’s fondness for working with ensemble casts, it comes as no surprise that his films often provide a shambolic cross-section of a particular institution or locale, whether the titular mobile army hospital of M*A*S*H, the indigenous country music scene in the great network narrative Nashville, or the intersecting lives of 20-odd Angelenos in 1993’s Short Cuts. For Short Cuts, Altman and co-screenwriter Frank Barhydt mashed together nine stories and a poem from “dirty realist” writer Raymond Carver, shifting their setting from Carver’s beloved Pacific Northwest to suburban Los Angeles—a place Altman clearly feels much more ambivalent about.Read More »

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Industrial Soundtrack for the Urban Decay traces the development of one of music’s most quietly influential genres from the post-industrial cities of Europe to America’s avant-garde scene, and features contributions from members of pioneering outfits : Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, NON, SPK, Test Dept, Clock DVA, Re/Search – V Vale, Z’EV, Click Click, Sordide Sentimental, Hula, The Klinik, Ant-Zen, Orphx, In The Nursery and Prima Linea.Read More »

In this colourful modern-day parable of good and evil, a humble village electrician devotes
his compassion and ingenuity to destitute neighbours in a wind-swept valley of
Kyrgyzstan.Read More »