Totò Al Giro D’Italia is about the 1948 edition of the Giro d’Italia, in which Professor Totò sells his soul to the devil in order to win the love of the bella Doriana. She agrees to marry him only if he can win the national bicycle race, calculating that this is an impossibility, but one stage after another he defeats all great cycling champions of that time (Coppi, Bartali, Schotte, Kubler, Bobet, Magni, et al).Read More »

Based on a true character, GIE is a central yet unknown political activist/writer in the 60’s, the darkest era of Indonesian history. His life is a clash between a high drama of political events, and small world of friendship and romance. He is falling apart when he sees that his constant battle for justice and truth gives labor to another dictatorial regime. As time passes the people around him adjust to the new regime, but he continues to fight. His uncompromised idealism drives people away. His friends left him; the woman he loves rejects him. Only the beauty of nature can rescue and free him.Read More »

A man hires a Private Investigator in order to find proof that his wife has been cheating on him. Soon, we learn that the man’s plan is to set the wife up, divorce her and remarry again in America with the daughter of his boss. The woman, being confronted with the suggestive evidence of her infidelity, has no other solution than to work on the sex industry for a while to pay for the Private Investigator’s silence.Read More »

Synopsis:
Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff has just been installed as the new president of Huxley College. His cavalier attitude toward education is not reserved for his son Frank, who is seeing the college widow, Connie Bailey. Frank influences Wagstaff to recruit two football players who hang out in a speakeasy, in order to beat rival school Darwin. Unfortunately, Wagstaff mistakenly hires the misfits Baravelli and Pinky. Finding out that Darwin has beaten him to the “real” players, Wagstaff enlists Baravelli and Pinky to kidnap them, which leads to an anarchic football finale.Read More »

This lyrical adaptation of the beloved novel by Junichiro Tanizaki was a late-career triumph for director Kon Ichikawa. Structured around the changing of the seasons, The Makioka Sisters (Sasame-yuki) follows the lives of four siblings who have taken on their family’s kimono manufacturing business, in the years leading up to the Pacific War. The two oldest have been married for some time, but according to tradition, the rebellious youngest sister cannot wed until the third, conservative and terribly shy, finds a husband. This graceful study of a family at a turning point in history is a poignant evocation of changing times and fading customs, shot in rich, vivid colors. (~Criterion)Read More »

Synopsis:
The small state of Freedonia is in a financial mess, borrowing a huge sum of cash from wealthy widow Mrs. Teasdale. She insists on replacing the current president with crazy Rufus T. Firefly and mayhem erupts. To make matters worse, the neighboring state sends inept spies Chicolini and Pinky to obtain top secret information, creating even more chaos!Read More »

Synopsis:
Captain Spaulding, the noted explorer, returns from Africa and attends a gala party held by Mrs. Rittenhouse. A painting displayed at that party is stolen, and the Marxes help recover it. Well, maybe ‘help’ isn’t quite the word I was looking for–this is the Marx Brothers, after all…
— Ken Yousten (IMDb)Read More »

Born in Mauritania and raised in Mali, Abderrahmane Sissako received a scholarship to study film in Moscow, after graduating from school. To learn Russian, he was sent to Rostov on the Don river for an entire year. On the endless train ride from Moscow to Rostov, he met Baribanga, an Angolan student who was going to the same language school. That year, far from home, the two Africans became friends. Almost two decades later, Sissako decides to search for Baribanga. Rostov-Luanda tells two stories, the search for the long-lost friend, that leads to an encounter with present-day Angola.Read More »

Hamlet is going crazy. His father has died suddenly of a strange disease, and his mother has married her deceased husband’s brother, of all people, after just one month. Hamlet has nighttime visions of his father, who claims his brother poisoned him, and exhorts Hamlet to take revenge and kill his new stepfather. Hamlet acts the part of the crazy man in order to hide his plans, and loses his grip on reality in the process. The whole world becomes a stagnant swamp to him. Desire and sexuality become a threatening abyss. The friends surrounding him turn out to be spies deployed by his stepfather to keep an eye on him. Read More »