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After a failed attempt at working on a foreign film set, 26 year-old Ana returns to her hometown of Strasbourg. Over the scorching summer that follows, she decides to replace her grandmother’s bathtub with a walk-in shower, eat peas and carrots with ketchup, drive a Porsche, harvest plums, lose her driver’s license, sleep with her best friend and get back together with her ex. In short, over this particular summer, Ana tries to get her life together.Read More »
Asuza is a yakusa always dressed in white, a pure, yet tarnished man. A child from the streets, he saw his father assassinated by his older brother, and his mother commit suicide. These traumatizing events haunt him in the present. Asuza is now a member of a criminal group. He has been taken under the wing of the gang’s leader, his new adoptive father. When this second father figure is suddenly assassinated, Asuza plunges rapidly into an infernal revenge scheme. As he searches tirelessly for the killer, he discovers that once again, his older brother is the culprit. A confrontation is inevitable. When Asuza meets his brother face to face, he learns that behind every murder committed, lie motives more complex than they first appear.Read More »
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A capital summarization of Roger Corman’s Poe cycle. The model is L’Amore, the meditation on the director’s art in contrasting moods addressed by the actor — Magnani playing urbane and then peasant for Rossellini, Vincent Price fitting Corman’s sense of the grotesque into august and absurdist guises. Morella, the first tale, gives a deft synthesis of House of Usher and The Pit and the Pendulum. Maggie Pierce enters a crumbling castle, inside are tarantulas in crimson chalices and a cake wrapped in cobwebs, Price is her grief-consumed father, her dead mother (Leona Gage) looms in spirit (an overseeing portrait) and in the flesh (a mummy in the boudoir); the vengeful past averts family healing, so the climax mates incest with necrophilia amid the flames.Read More »
Pacific Cinémathèque Pacifique writes:
The Sleeping City is a gritty, claustrophobic thriller set in a metropolitan hospital. Its jarring opening has a burned-out intern, out on a smoke break, shot point-blank in the face. Film noir fixture Richard Conte heads the “Confidential Squad” that goes undercover to investigate. Coleen Gray is the attractive head nurse with whom Conte becomes involved — and who may be mixed-up in some major medical skulduggery. Read More »
Synopsis:
William Wyler’s dark and poisonous melodrama, based on the W. Somerset Maugham novel, features Bette Davis in one of her nastiest roles. The story begins in the shimmering moonlight on a tropical Malayan rubber plantation. Shots ring out and a wounded man, Geoffrey Hammond (David Newell) staggers from a bungalow as Leslie Crosbie (Bette Davis) coldly follows him, pumping the remaining bullets into his body. She later tells her husband Robert (Herbert Marshall) that she shot Geoffrey, a mutual friend, because he was drunk and tried to take advantage of her. Robert, who owns the plantation, believes her story and hires high-powered lawyer Howard Joyce (James Stephenson) to defend her. Read More »
“A riveting. all-elbows and knuckles documentary about the proto-punk warriors known as the MCS” – NY Times
“The film is a touching, detailed portrait of an important and often overlooked band” – SF Chronicle
Premise: This documentary examines the career of the Detroit rock group, the MC5 (1964-1972), a hard-edged rock band that emerged amidst the political turmoil of the late 1960s. As the band’s popularity grew, their chance at broader popularity was challenged by their ties to counterculture individuals like John Sinclair (leader of the left-wing revolutionary group, the White Panthers) whose presence made the band controversial targets for the police, government, FBI, etc. Establishing a fast, guitar-fueled loud rock sound that would influence the punk bands just a few years later, the MC5 eventually faded into obscurity, but they have maintained a cult following ever since.Read More »
Despite a short run time this is a breezy, effective British mystery. A Scotland Yard Inspector (Anthony Hulme) is on holidays with his friend, a newspaper reporter. The two come into a small village for rest and refreshments before continuing their holiday. Their peace is disturbed when a villager runs into the local pub declaring the owner of a nearby mansion has been murdered.Read More »
A man looking to transplant cherry blossoms along the countryside encounters a blind woman who accompanies him for the journey.Read More »
