A lancer falls into disgrace when his social ambitions lead him to become engaged to two different women.

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LEAD: Don’t be put off by the title. ”Gonza the Spearman” is not an Eastern western. Masahiro Shinoda’s stately work, which opens the Public Theater’s Autumn in Japan series today, has few duels and only a gout or two of blood. Instead, it is filled with historical imagination, social comment and restrained passion, along with scene after elegantly composed scene of a culture that seems to have been paralyzed in a spare beauty.Read More »

Synopsis
A pioneering first feature from Menelik Shabazz, much of it shot around the Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove communities, Burning an Illusion marked a coming of age for black British cinema. A film about transformation and identity, it is a love story that traces the emotional and political growth of a young black couple in Thatcher’s London. It was the first British film to give a central voice to a black woman, charting her journey to emotional maturity, emancipation and political awakening.Read More »

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The first film in Pedro Costa’s transformative trilogy about Fontainhas, an impoverished quarter of Lisbon, Ossos is a tale of young lives torn apart by desperation. After a suicidal teenage girl gives birth, she misguidedly entrusts her baby’s safety to the troubled, deadbeat father, whose violent actions take the viewer on a tour of the foreboding, crumbling shantytown in which they live. With its reserved, shadowy cinematography by Emmanuel Machuel (who collaborated with Bresson on L’argent), Ossos is a haunting look at a devastated community.Read More »

[The Red Lantern] tells the story of a Eurasian, Joan of Arc-like heroine, Mahlee, who forsakes her own people to live among white Europeans, until political tumult draws her back across the color line to foment anti-imperialist uprising in China’s 1900 Boxer Rebellion. While Mahlee literally “hears voices” (à la Joan of Arc) that compel her to revolutionary action, star actress Alla Nazimova doubles in this role as Mahlee and as her estranged white [half]-sister, Blanche Sackville. Blanche’s sister from another mother (i.e., their white British father’s Chinese mistress), Mahlee struggles with her simultaneous attraction and repulsion towards her kinfolk colonizers — and more pointedly with the politics of British colonialism in fin-de-siècle China.Read More »

MARK SCHILLING wrote:
Junji Sakamoto’s “Zatoichi: The Last,” the latest revival, doesn’t feature Katsu, who died in 1997 after a wild, riotous life. Instead it stars the hyper SMAP singer Shingo Katori, who has mostly appeared on the big screen in comedies (“The Uchoten Hotel”) or kiddie actioners (“Saiyuki”).

Also, instead of portraying Ichi as an outcast and loner, the film gives him a wife, friends, a community — and strong feelings for all of them.Read More »

Synopsis:
Two car manufacturers spy on each other to try to find out details and prices of a new sports car each is about to launch.

Review:
Yasuzo Masumura’s 1962 spy thriller Black Test Car pits rival agencies against each other in an escalating game of theft, deceit, and sabotage. And no, the title isn’t a mistranslation. The movie opens with the Tiger corporation suffering through a disastrous test run for its latest sports-car model, the Pioneer.Read More »

In 2052, a man wanders through a semi-constructed high rise in pursuit of hidden targets, in a minimalist rethinking of Blade Runner.Read More »

(SIRIUS 6B, Year 2078) On a distant mining planet ravaged by a decade of war, scientists have created the perfect weapon: a blade-wielding, self-replicating race of killing devices known as Screamers designed for one purpose only — to hunt down and destroy all enemy life forms But man’s greatest weapon has continued to evolve without any human guidance, and now it has devised a new mission: to obliterate all life. Col. Hendricksson (Peter Weller) is commander of a handful of Alliance soldiers still alive on Sirius 6B. Betrayed by his own political leaders and disgusted by the atrocities of this never-ending war, Hendricksson decides he must negotiate a separate peace with the New Economic Bloc’s decimated forces. But to do so, he will have to cross a treacherous wasteland where the deadliest threat comes from the very weapons he helped to create.Read More »

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A simple story about the status of old people in African society told with amazing grace”. A small african village. Bila, a ten year old boy who befriends an old woman, Sana. Everybody calls her ‘Witch’ but Bila himself calls her ‘Yaaba’ (grandmother). When Bilas cousin Nopoko gets sick it is Sana’s medicin who rescues her.Read More »