Quote:
When I heard that Aki Kaurismaki was making a silent black-and-white feature, I expected something arch and postmodernist. Yet in spite of a few flashes of mordant humor, some wonderfully spare sound effects, and a few minimalist lighting schemes that suggest 50s Hollywood, this 1999 film is a moving pastiche whose strength is its sincerity and authenticity. A fallen-woman story set in the present, featuring a farm couple and an evil playboy from the city who lures the wife away, it conveys the sort of purity and innocence associated with silent cinema storytelling, including a love of nature and animals, a taste for stark melodrama, and an emotional directness in the acting–evocative at various times of Griffith in the teens and Murnau in the 20s.Read More »

Synopsis:
Emmanuelle is a beautiful young model and lives in Bangkok together with her husband Jean, who’s several years older. She likes him because he’s taught her much, and he likes her because she’s learning so well – and wants to often. Both are very tolerant in matters of extramarital affairs, so he doesn’t mind the young Marie-Ange coming over every so often, although she obviously wants more than talk from his wife. But Emmanuelle is more fascinated by the older Bee, and joins her on a trip into the jungle.Read More »

Synopsis:
After two-month of separation, Emmanuelle must find her husband, Jean in Hong-Kong. She goes there by boat. Once in Thailand, she finds her husband and meets Christopher, a mysterious airplane pilot. At a dinner, she also meets Laura, Jean’s mistress and her troubling stepdaughter Anna Maria. She proceeds to have several extramarital affairs — with Jean’s knowledge, of course.Read More »

Quote:
The love of two adolescents for the same girl, in 1944, which is disrupted by the demands of war. From the novel by Titus Popovici.Read More »

Francis, a young man, recalls in his memory the horrible experiences he and his fiancée Jane recently went through. It is the annual fair in Holstenwall. Francis and his friend Alan visit The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, an exhibit where the mysterious doctor shows the somnambulist Cesare, and awakens him for some moments from his death-like sleep. When Alan asks Cesare about his future, Cesare answers that he will die before dawn. The next morning Alan is found dead. Francis suspects Cesare of being the murderer, and starts spying on him and Dr. Caligari. The following night Cesare is going to stab Jane in her bed, but softens when he sees the beautiful woman, and instead of committing another murder, he abducts her. Read More »

“A father and son, both clowns, are to perform together for the first time, but the civil war separates them, and the elder Buldy, tempted for a moment to acquiesce to the White forces, casts his lot with the revolution. At the climax Buldy Jr. escapes the Whites thanks to flashy trampoline and trapeze acrobatics; the gaping enemy soldiers forget to shoot. Even Kuleshov’s more naturalistic films show flashes of kinetic, stylized acting. A partisan listens to a boy while draping himself over a door. A Bolshevik official answers the phone by reaching across his chest, twisting his body so the unused arm can hike itself up, right-angled, to the chair.”
by David BordwellRead More »

Quote:
I topi grigi, an eight-part serial produced by Tiber Film in Rome, is part of the complex saga of Za la Mort, an apache and outlaw who was the protagonist of 12 films, four serials, three novels and various theatrical shows created between 1914 and 1930 by Emilio Ghione (1879-1930).
Thanks to his alter ego Za, Ghione would eventually become a genuinely popular star. On one hand he incarnated the role of fearless hero and was the emblem of muscular masculinity. On the other he was also a natural performer in the role of a dandy in several melodramas set in the salons of the decadent, contemporary nobility – a setting reflecting the D’Annunzio-inspired atmosphere of the period.Read More »

Quote:
While in San Francisco for the promotion of her last film in October 1967, Agnès Varda, tipped by her friend Tom Luddy, gets to know a relative she had never heard of before, Jean Varda, nicknamed “Yanco”. This hitherto unknown uncle lives on a boat in Sausalito, is a painter, has adopted a hippie lifestyle and loves life. The meeting is a very happy one.Read More »

Based on the scandalous memoirs of a pseudonymous French model Joy Laurey.Read More »