Geoff Andrew, Time Out wrote:
A classic of the genre, almost documentary in approach – low budget, no stars, Folsom Prison locations, inmates as extras – and boiling up an explosive violence kept under perfect control. Not looking for cosy answers (in fact, final victory shades ironically into defeat), the script’s prime concern is less to establish the need for reform than to demonstrate the fallibilities that militate against its accomplishment: Neville Brand’s riot leader and Emile Meyer’s warden are men of integrity in essential agreement as to what needs to be done, but each is attended by an evil genius – one psychopathic, the other corrupt – so that simple issues mutate into an entirely different ball game. A riveting movie.Read More »

Synopsis:
A post-war housing crisis leaves a shy woman to share a house with two couples. Comic situations arise as the new roomer becomes infatuated with one of the husbands.Read More »

from imdb review:
In 1972, Sartre sat in his apartment in the Montparnasse section of Paris for a film documentary: archive footage (including clips from the 1967 Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal, convened in London by Bertrand Russell; that’s U.S. antiwar activist Dave Dellinger to Sartre’s right) and Sartre being interviewed by old friends, including Simone de Beauvoir. A real historical find, particularly with the endless talking-head revisionism conducted nightly on CNN & its broadcast progeny.Read More »

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This is the story of Mama, a.k.a. Keiko, a middle-aged geisha who must choose to either get married or buy a bar of her own. Her family hounds her for money, her customers for her attention, and she is continually in debt. The life of a geisha is examined as well as the way in which the system traps and sometimes kills those in it.Read More »

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Steve McQueen stars as a rockabilly hopeful, newly paroled from prison, and Lee Remick as his estranged wife in Baby the Rain Must Fall (1965), brought to us by the same triumvirate that translated To Kill a Mockingbird to the screen in 1962: writer Horton Foote, producer Alan J. Pakula, and director Robert Mulligan. A poignant slice of life shot in and around Foote’s Texas hometown.Read More »

Synopsis:
In meeting in Kansas, ex-cons Perry Smith and Dick Hickock are breaking several conditions of their respective paroles. The meeting, initiated by Dick, is to plan and eventually carry out a robbery based on information he had received from a fellow inmate about $10,000 cash being locked in a hidden safe in the home of the farming Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas. After the robbery, they plan on going to Mexico permanently to elude capture by the police. Each brings a necessary personality to the partnership to carry out the plan, Dick who is the brash manipulator, Perry the outwardly more sensitive but unrealistic dreamer with a violent streak under the surface.Read More »

The Law and the Lady is the third film version of the venerable Frederick Lonsdale stage play The Last of Mrs. Cheyney. Greer Garson follows in the footsteps of Norma Shearer and Joan Crawford as a beautiful confidence trickster, working in concert with a suave jewel thief (Michael Wilding). Jane Hoskins (Garson) inveigles herself into the household of San Francisco dowager Warton (Marjorie Main), where she and her accomplice intend to take their feisty hostess for everything she’s got. Thanks to censorial intervention, many of the sharper satirical edges of the Lonsdale original have been dulled by sentiment and pathos. Still, any film that offers Greer Garson as a not-so-nice lady is well worth having.Read More »

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Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s controversial, fifteen-hour Berlin Alexanderplatz, based on Alfred Döblin’s great modernist novel, was the crowning achievement of a prolific director who, at age thirty-four, had already made over thirty films. Fassbinder’s immersive epic follows the hulking, childlike ex-convict Franz Biberkopf (Günter Lamprecht) as he attempts to “become an honest soul” amid the corrosive urban landscape of Weimar-era Germany. With equal parts cynicism and humanity, Fassbinder details a mammoth portrait of a common man struggling to survive in a viciously uncommon time.Read More »

Based on the true story of a Chinese painter, Pan Yuliang (Gong Li), whose work was celebrated in Paris yet rejected at home. At fifteen years old, she was sold into prostitution. Her life changes when she marries a high official. Through her husband, she finds expression in western painting, and furthers her studies in Paris. Although highly respected in Paris, it wasn’t until after her death that she received the acceptance at home she so desperately sought. The film is directed by Huang Shuqin, a woman director famous for highlighting the influence of tradition on gender issues.Read More »