Based on Patrick Galvin’s memoir, ‘Song for a Raggy Boy’ is set in the grey, grim surroundings of a brutal Irish reform school in 1939. While the storyline has unmistakable parallels with ‘The Magdalene Sisters’, it deserves more than to be dismissed as this year’s indictment of religious orders.Read More »
The same morning that carnival begins, a serene finds in Madrid the corpse of a rich and greedy lender who has been murdered. The main suspect is a seller of watches that owed much money to the old woman, but her daughter, not content with the arrest of his father, begins to investigate on their own …Read More »
Online review of film:
Eventually it may be that Noah Baumbach could turn into this country’s answer to France’s Eric Rohmer, turning out a steady diet of small, circumspect dramas about the lives and neurotic times of New York-era literary bourgeoisie. That’s one of the things that comes to mind as one takes in Margot at the Wedding, Baumbach’s fourth time out as writer/director and one that seems to set a template for the future. It’s a chill breeze of a film steeped in ugly inter-familial squabbling and the blinkered mentality of its self-absorbed characters who can generally only raise their gaze from their own navels long enough to find something lacking in the person they’re addressing.Read More »
Quote:
Mr Vives is not fond of the lazy farmer’s hand who keeps blocking the road with his large harvester, so he gets back at him, and the farmer’s hand gets back at Mr Vives, and round and round it goes. Until one day, when this causes Mr Vives to lose his job and come back early to discover his wife in bed with another man. Furious, he drives up to the farm hand in the middle of a field and starts a fist fight which ends in the harvester. They wake up together at the hospital, both with useless legs. It seems they’re doomed to stay together from now on.Read More »
Synopsis by AMG:
After a 14-year-absence, Teruo Ishii returned to the director’s chair with this anthology film based on the works of manga artist Yoshiharu Tsuge. The main character in all four segments is a fledgling cartoonist named Tsube (Shiro Sano). In the first segment, Tsube encounters a dotty old man named Ri (Akio Yokoyama) after renting a tumble-down cottage in the country. The following day, Ri, his equally weird wife (Chika Nakagami), and his two squalid children move into his house. Soon the wife is stealing the cucumbers in his garden while the two kids devour all the food in the house.Read More »
Three Georgians have to clean a castle where an arms manufacturer’s art collection is on exhibit. They aren’t welcome at the opening party and are banished to the attic, but downstairs the splendid buffet attracts them. Why not just ignore the unfair prohibition and cross the line of class society?Read More »
In the curious story of this magic-realistic film, the customs of ethnic mountain peoples in Vietnam are linked to the idiosyncrasies of modern art. There are three protagonists, who live on a lonely mountain. They are the old father and his two children: his beautiful, nubile daughter and a mentally handicapped son. Tradition dictates that the son first has to marry in order to ensure the male family line is continued. For that, young men go to the annual marriage market, but the undesirable son returns every year without a bride. The old man is determined that his son will father a child before he dies and takes unusual measures to ensure this.
The film was banned in its own country, primarily because of the sexual themes, but also possibly because of its unruly form.Read More »
Plot Synopsis by Hal Erickson
Suspected Person was one of several Associated British Pathe productions released in the U.S. by PRC pictures. Clifford Evans stars as Jim Raynor, one of a trio of American bank robbers. When Raynor flees to England with the loot, he leaves his two accomplices at the mercy of the Law. Winning unexpected acquittals, the two crooks chase after Raynor — while Scotland Yard, hoping to recover the money, chases after all three. A very young Patricia Roc essays one of her first major roles as Raynor’s sister, while future “Dr. Who” William Hartnell plays a minor role.Read More »
In World War II, desert hotel proprietors Emad (Sir Peter Ustinov) and Yasmin (Yvonne De Carlo) are caught between the warring armies and have to constantly shift their political allegiance to whichever army happens to control the area.Read More »