This fascinating and entertaining documentary celebrates the work of Reynold Brown, one of the most acclaimed movie poster artists of all time.
This film illustrates scores of Brown’s compelling posters, interwoven with clips from these B-Movie classics.Read More »
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‘Marina’s sister drowned herself, her brother is both headstrong and weak, and her widowed mother has a reputation for sleeping around. Plus, Marina, who’s family was rich before the war, is aloof: so she’s the object of the jealousy and scorn of Hydra’s young men, especially Christos, whom she rejected. She fears harassment whenever she leaves her house. When two Athenians on vacation board at Marina’s family home, things come to a head: she falls in love with Pavlos, one of the visitors, and he with her. The young men in town stalk and jeer her; then play a cruel trick on Pavlos that goes awry with tragic results. Can any good come from the catharsis of tragedy?’
– jhaileyRead More »
Popular animated hero Asterix and his faithful sidekick Obelix travel to ancient Egypt to help Cleopatra build a new summer home. Cleopatra and Julius Caesar have made a bet, with Caesar wagering the project cannot be completed in a few weeks time. With the help of a magic potion, Asterix comes to the rescue of the Queen of the Nile as Caesar and an angry architect plot against them.Read More »
Laxe himself stars as a self-described “neo-colonialist” filmmaker who goes to Tangiers ostensibly to hold a series of film workshops. It quickly becomes clear, however, that his intentions are not purely disinterested, as he begins to turn these children into pawns in the service of his own film.
Next in our Back-To-School series, and part of our close-up on Laxe, is his startling debut, in which he also stars. Shot on gorgeous monochrome 16mm, this singular “meta-docu-fiction” expands on the concept of hybrid filmmaking and keeps questioning itself—and cinema—both playfully and politically.Read More »
This hilarious movie catapults two youngsters hitting puberty into the opposite sex after a fall from which they recover in each other’s bodies. The timid sensitive girl becomes the effeminate insecure boy, and the unredeeming prankster becomes the loud clumsy girl with a chip on her shoulder. Both lead actors do tremendous jobs portraying the opposite sex, and often do so delivering more than a laugh. It ends in a bittersweet tone, but it is a really cute movie with hilarious moments.Read More »
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Two troubled teens hitchhike across Bulgaria.
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Avé (Anjela Nedyalkova) and Kamen (Ovanes Torosian) meet on the road, hitchhiking toward Ruse in northern Bulgaria for different and ultimately unclear reasons. He wears a black leather jacket over a blue hoodie with the hood up; she wears a red jacket atop a black hoodie, a brown cap on her head. Little is made of the clothes in the dialogue that begins to build between the two strangers, but the way they dress, along with a few other seemingly minor directorial choices and scriptural contrivances, denote Konstantin Bojanov’s Avé as something more memorable and fascinating than a great deal of modern road movies, never mind post-adolescent romances.Read More »
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The final film completed by Ernst Lubitsch, this zany, zippy comedy of manners, set in England on the cusp of World War II, is one of the worldly-wise director’s most effervescent creations. Jennifer Jones shines in a rare comedic turn as Cluny Brown, an irrepressible heroine with a zeal for plumbing. Sent to work as a parlormaid at a stuffy country manor, she proceeds to turn the household upside down—with plenty of help from Adam Belinski (Charles Boyer), an eccentric Continental exile who has fled the Nazis but is still worried about where his next meal is coming from. Sending up British class hierarchy with Lubitsch’s famously light touch, Cluny Brown is a topsy-turvy farce that says nuts to the squirrels and squirrels to the nuts.Read More »
This historical-biographical film begins in the first days of November 1918 on the western front. News comes to the soldiers of a revolutionary uprising in Kiel. Young Thälmann, a soldier against his will, would like to join the expanding conflict on the side of his comrades in Hamburg. As the revolution becomes threatened by the betrayal of the right-wing Social Democrats and the splintering of the working class, he nevertheless tries unremittingly to unite the workers. The reactionaries grow ever stronger and the neediness of ordinary people multiplies. In this dire situation, the Hamburg police commissioner would like to block the unloading of a ship full of provisions that were sent from Petrograd as a message of solidarity. But Thälmann prevails in unloading it. The high point and conclusion of the first part of the Thälmann films is established at the Hamburg Uprising in October 1923.Read More »
The second part of the Ernst Thaelmann films encompasses the time period between 1930 and Thaelmann’s murder in 1944. It shows Thaelmann’s battle to achieve a united front with all German workers against the National Socialists, his arrest following Hitler’s seizure of power and the eleven years of his incarceration, in which he unwaveringly clings to his beliefs until his death. An attempt to free him on the part of his comrades ends disastrously, and a corrupt offer of freedom from Goering himself receives Thaelmann’s refusal. Read More »