Quote:
Werner Herzog returns to the South American jungle with Juliane Koepcke, the German woman who was the sole survivor of a plane crash there in 1971. They find the remains of the plane and recreate her journey out of the jungle.Read More »

Roy Chen Chih-Lai is a sick rapist/serial killer with a leg fetish, and cuts off his victims’ legs as trophies after he’s through with them. One day at a bank robbery shootout, he catches police woman Cheng Hsuen on camera, and chooses her to be his next victim. He begins to stalk her and enter her personal life, even waiting for her inside her home. He notices her sister, Kelly, as well (who is also a cop), and her boyfriend, Ken. After he kidnaps and rapes Kelly, Cheng decides to lure the madman by using herself as bait, and bring justice to the situation.Read More »

Politician get hitch hikers on road and in one car accident they all end up on a tree above the sea.

Quote:
Henri Roubier is an industrialist who has negotiated a contract to build a national roadway, making himself a rich man in the process. On his way to a meeting with the French Prime Minister, he gets caught up in a traffic jam and two hitch-hikers force their way into his car – a young man and a young woman, who have just met. Roubier drives off at great speed – but his car goes over the edge of a cliff.Read More »

Quote:
Homicide Capt. Finlay finds evidence that one or more of a group of demobilized soldiers is involved in the death of Joseph Samuels. In flashbacks, we see the night’s events from different viewpoints as Sergeant Keeley investigates on his own, trying to clear his friend Mitchell, to whom circumstantial evidence points. Then the real, ugly motive for the killing begins to dawn on both Finlay and Keeley…Read More »

Statare, or country workers who recieved most of their payment in natura and didn’t own their own land, were the lowest of the low in Old Sweden. Maria – nicknamed ‘Rya-Rya’ – is born into this lot. A beautiful young woman, who the men tend to flock to, she quickly becomes with child. Her life changes forever…

Based on a novel by Ivar Lo Johansson.Read More »

Marya, a Russian Jewish girl (Elissa Landi) is forced into a life of prostitution in Czarist Russia – a scandal to the naïve muckraking British journalist (Laurence Olivier). They both eventually find their lives endangered when she reveals to him tales of social crimes rampant in her country. The lecherous Baron (Lionel Barrymore), popping pills for “extra potency,” is also head of the secret police, and he is determined to seperate them.Read More »

This is a little like an extended but half-serious variation on the “Uptown Girl” song video where the working-class guy meets the beautiful model from the billboard. But a few more people are involved. Here, the guy is married and his daughter has a crush on the weatherman. The weatherman wants to marry the cosmetics queen from the billboards. The cosmetics queen kind of likes the guy’s sidekick. The sidekick kind of likes the guy’s daughter, although she’s in high school and the age difference would raise anyone’s eyebrows. The movie is a nice character study about accepting or denying who we really are and what we really want. It’s missing an anchor character in the middle with whom the audience could identify, but the eccentrics are obviously what interested the filmmakers. Real-life cosmetics queen Pnina Rosenblum was a good enough sport to allow her own home to be used as the home of the fictional character based on herself.Read More »

Quote:

Lino Brocka’s “Ang Tatay Kong Nanay” (My Father, My Mother, roughly, 1978) is the master filmmaker’s one collaboration with the near-universally acknowledged King of Philippine Comedy, Dolphy (Rodolfo Vera Quizon). Screen legends working with famed filmmakers rarely if ever create sure bets; it’s something of a surprise, then that the resulting picture from these two is so straightforwardly poignant, laced with just enough humor to wriggle past one’s defenses.Read More »

Face To Face With The Past (Part 2):
Alan Berliner’s “Nobody’s Business”
by Andrew J. Horton (from Kinoeye)

Intrigued by his family’s Central European past, Alan Berliner turned the camera on his father to find out more. Nobody’s Business (USA, 1996) is Berliner’s witty account of the uphill struggle which followed. You might have thought that interviewing your father would be a relatively easy thing for a documentarist to do. You obviously don’t have a father like Alan Berliner’s. Tetchy and cantankerous, Oscar Berliner has little understanding for his son’s project – and this is the joy of the film.Read More »