Synopsis:
In the teeming black markets of postwar Japan, Shozo Hirono (Bunta Sugawara) and his buddies find themselves in a new war between fractious and ambitious yakuza. After joining boss Yamamori, Shozo is drawn into a feud with his sworn brother¹s family, the Dois. But that¹s where the chivalry of traditional yakuza film ends and the hypocrisy, betrayal, and assassinations begin. A rare and critical perspective on the history of Japan after World War II, BATTLES WITHOUT HONOR AND HUMANITY is a tour-de-force that revolutionized the yakuza genre and launched Kinji Fukasaku and Bunta Sugawara to international stardom.Read More »

Based on the true life experiences of poet Jimmy Santiago Baca, the film focuses on half-brothers Paco and Cruz, and their bi-racial cousin Miklo. It opens in 1972, as the three are members of an East L.A. gang known as the “Vatos Locos”, and the story focuses on how a violent crime and the influence of narcotics alter their lives. Miklo is incarcerated and sent to San Quentin, where he makes a “home” for himself. Cruz becomes an exceptional artist, but a heroin addiction overcomes him with tragic results. Paco becomes a cop and an enemy to his “carnal”, Miklo.Read More »

Quote:
A man grows obssessed with his erstwhile childhood sweetheart and it leads to a haunting encounter with horror.Read More »

Plot
Artist Renato, a man with murderous intentions, meets Monica, a young university student who lives in a dismal house in the Lombard suburbs. But all is not as it seems. Fractured memories, voices from the past…Read More »

Quote:
Coming closer to his dream of leading a normal life, a professional safecracker agrees to do a job for the Mafia, who has other plans for him.Read More »

Quote:
Beautifully dark movie which grants Mia Farrow the freedom to showcase the strange range of her gift. Elizabeth Taylor stays close with a deep and sensitive touch, flashing a legitimate side of herself, oft covered up. Robert Mitchum achieves repulsive perfection lurking in the garden, symbolic of the disgust and fear we share in our hide. The entire cast in breath and stone include every sense in totality, placing the actors and ourselves together to spy on each other from above, and within the ornamental mansion. Intense hallucinogenic 1968 camera shots intimately portray the family by chance’s horrific existence. Read More »

Synopsis:
‘The bourgeois family Olmi observes here is caught in a process of disintegration that hardly requires the promptings of a languid summer’s minor crisis. A motorcycle crash, a business reorganisation seminar and a childbirth represent the unlikely-seeming dramatic punctuation in Olmi’s mosaic portrait of minimal domestic communication; while the director himself adopts an uncharacteristically elliptical structure and a rare stridency to capture both the frenetic tail-chasing and tentative adaptations to change which criss-cross the dead institutional centre. If the criticism is muted, it’s because for Olmi, every new circumstance offers at least a new option.’
– Time OutRead More »

Quote:
Occident is a bittersweet comedy that focuses on the growing tendency of Eastern European youth to migrate west. When the amicable Luci (Alexandru Papadopol) and his beautiful lover Sorina (Anca Androne) are evicted from their apartment, Sorina decides they must visit her father’s grave and ask for a “sign”. Seconds later, Luci is hit in the head by a bottle and taken to the hospital by a Frenchman. Despite her love for Luci, Sorina believes a life with security takes precedence over romance, and moves in with the good samaritan. Read More »

Quote:
One of Manoel de Oliveira’s masterpieces, A Caixa (The Box) / Blind Man’s Bluff is an adaptation, in parable form, of a play of the same name by Prista Monteiro.
The action takes place around a flight of steps in a poor neighbourhood and is about the final misadventure of an old Blind Man who has yet again been robbed of the official alms box with which he earns is living. His daughter, besides doing the house work, wears herself out taking in washing. Her companion, an unemployed lay-about like many of his friends, lives off the Blind Man’s box which has just been stolen for the second time.Read More »