Edgardo Cozarinsky ’s pioneering film essay, La guerre d’un seul homme (“One Man’s War”), combined newsreels from the Nazi occupation of Paris with extracts from the diaries of the writer Ernst Junger, at the time Military Governor of the French capital. The effect is both disturbing and illuminating as to the kind of constructions and truth-claims involved in the newsreel and the diary. Made in exile in France, during the harshest period of the military dictatorship in Cozarinsky’s native Argentina, the ethical and political implications go well beyond what happened in France during World War II.Read More »

Quote:
What is the nature of childhood resilience? Sisters Jin and Bin, ages 6 and 3, live with their mother. Jin likes school and does well. One day, their mother leaves the girls with their father’s sister, a woman they do not know. The mother seeks a reconciliation with their father. She leaves them a plastic piggy bank, promising to return when the bank is full. The girls scrub and clean for their aunt, a tippler who’s often cranky and complaining. She gives them a few coins for their work. They earn more money catching, grilling, and selling grasshoppers. They miss their mother. The bank fills. They watch for her from a mound of dirt. Will she return? Will stoic faces give way to a smile?Read More »

Synopsis:
In a high-rise, a young man jumps to his death. His ghost remains in the building, observing and consoling three households. San San, fat, silent, and alone, hears the ghost of her mother constantly upbraid her. She futilely seeks the friendship of a wealthy woman with whom she was raised. Ah Gu, a tofu soup vendor, is at odds with Lily, his materialistic wife, a Chinese immigrant who longs for something he cannot provide. Meng spouts every moralistic bromide of the striving middle class, wears a T-shirt reading “My block is the cleanest,” and is unhinged by his teenage sister May (“Trixie” to her boyfriend) who won’t study, parties all night, and seems doomed by youth culture.Read More »

Quote:
While there is now at least a little bit of recognition for the early German and Austrian sound film, the same cannot be said for films from Switzerland. Although Switzerland never had a big film industry, especially not at that time, I assume there might be some real gems to discover, if this film here is any indication.Read More »

Judith Fontaine (Regina Carrol) is looking for her sister Joanie, who has disappeared into the hippie community of Venice, California. It turns out Joanie has become the victim of Groton (Lon Chaney Jr.), an axe-wielding homicidal maniac working for Dr. Durray (J. Carrol Naish), who is really the last of the Frankensteins and is now running a house of horrors by the beach and is performing experiments on Gorton’s victims. One night Count Dracula (Zandor Vorkov) visits the doctor, showing him the original Frankenstein creation that was buried in a nearby graveyard. The doctor revives it and uses it to take revenge on his professional rivals.Read More »

PLOT & Review:
Benvenuto Cellini (1500-71) knows no obstacles (or scruples) when he has to create a work of art or win the heart (and the rest) of a woman.
R. Freda does a genuinely popular cinema, practicing many genres, from drama to horror. Faced with a film of adventure, as here, he can be concise and engaging.
(Morandini)Read More »

Synopsis:
The Magnificent Seven Deadly Sins is a 1971 comedy film directed and produced by Graham Stark. Its title is a conflation of The Magnificent Seven and the seven deadly sins. It comprises a sequence of seven sketches, each representing a sin and written by an array of British comedy-writing talent. The sketches are linked by animation sequences.Read More »

Outside at night. Tower of lodgings. A syncopated jazz accompanies the successive appearances of young people in front of the camera. Zim, delivered to the police by locals for stealing gasoline, ends up in jail. On the day of his release, he meets Jean-Pierre, who has just been released from the same Parisian jail. The two youngsters become friends. Back in the suburb, Zim decides to find a job and tries to convince Jean-Pierre to go with him… without success. Far from New Wave movies which are becoming more and more bourgeois,
“Les Cœurs verts” is the first fiction film centred on the youth of the housing estates, played by a real gang of greasers, these “bad boys” from the working class, who were then in the news.Read More »

Quote:In the tradition of Eötvös, to whom the film is dedicated as a “pioneer for truth and justice”, Pabst portrays the reality of Jewish life in hauntingly designed scenes and explains both religious superstitions and racist, nationalistic and economic-political arguments against anti-Semitism , which is based on anti-Semitic pamphlets such as the alleged ‘Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion’: this forgery had not yet been published in 1882, but predecessor writings were already widespread and Pabst drew a parallel with this consciously used anachronism to Hitler, who in “Mein Kampf “Expressly mentions the ‘protocols’. Read More »