Synopsis:
On his way to Africa, Don Pietro, a young missionary priest has his suitcase stolen in the station of Naples. While making every effort to retrieve his baggage he finds out how devastated and miserable the city of Naples is. Learning that he has been the victim of gang of local street urchins, he decides that is mission is here in Naples, not under distant skies. He creates a home for poor kids, assisted by Maddalena, the cook, with a view to putting the “scugnizzi” back on the right track. He is very successful with Peppinello, who shows gratitude for what the priest is doing and feels good in his new secure home. But other kids do not play by the rules and find the home a convenient place for hiding the product of their thefts…Read More »

Quote:
A wealthy young wastrel, Bob Merrick, cracks up his speedboat and almost dies, to be saved at the last minute by a resuscitator borrowed from the home of a famous surgeon who lives nearby. In the meantime the surgeon himself has suffered an attack, and, with his equipment out on loan, dies before he can be revived. The guilt-ridden Bob clumsily tries to make amends by romancing the surgeon’s young widow, Helen, but only causes further tragedy…Read More »

Chokon depicts the tragic lives of two brothers in the late Edo period; the title is a word borrowed from the Chinese, meaning “the grudge that one cannot forget.”

Only the last reel of this feature survives, but even a fragment vividly demonstrates Daisuke Ito’s visual style.Read More »

“In some ways more obscure and difficult than Jean-Luc Godard, with whom she has collaborated in various capacities since 1972, Anne-Marie Mieville continues to puzzle even as she sharpens her mise en scene. This 80-minute feature from 1997 is the most interesting solo effort of hers I’ve seen, though I’m not entirely sure what to make of it, especially during the third and final sequence. In the first and most impressive sequence, an extract from Plato’s Gorgias is dramatized inside a bourgeois household, with Callicles (Bernadette Lafont) performing various household chores as she quarrels with Socrates (Aurore Clement). In the second, Godard turns up on a theater stage to rehearse a monologue condensed from a passage in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism below a huge photograph of Arendt as a young woman, an image that recalls the opening of Bergman’s Persona.Read More »

Alice, a buoyant and impertinent redhead teenager, is far from the charming little girl her mother adopted when she was unable to have a child of her own. Being an endless source of problems and affected by her mother’s disappointments, Alice forges lies and blurs the lines between the fiction she creates for herself and the reality of her existence. Until her mother discovers she is pregnant.Read More »

Possibly in Michigan is an operatic fairy tale of cannibalism, desire and dread in Middle America, a densely collaged narrative in which Beauty meets the Beast in the surreal landscape of shopping-mall suburbia. Two women with a penchant for “violence and perfume” take revenge on their animal-masked male persecutor. In this contemporary rendering of gothic enchantment, victim becomes aggressor and the familiar becomes the fantastic. Condit reworks popular narrative conventions using black humor, sing-song dialogue, and ironically gruesome images. Constructing a comically grim fairy tale of dreamlike pursuit and sexual violence, she inverts traditional Freudian metaphors to impart a subversive voice to her transgressive heroines: “I bite at the hand that feeds me.” Possibly in Michigan is a classic tale of psychosexual horror, retold as an irreverent fantasy of the other.Read More »

Synopsis:
Pinky, a light skinned black woman, returns to her grandmother’s house in the South after graduating from a Northern nursing school. Pinky tells her grandmother that she has been “passing” for white while at school in the North. In addition, Pinky has fallen in love with a young white doctor, Dr. Thomas Adams, who knows nothing about her black heritage. Pinky says that she will return to the North, but Granny Johnson convinces her to stay and treat an ailing white woman, Miss Em. Meanwhile, Dr. Canady, a black physician from another part of the state, visits Pinky and asks her to train some African American students, but she declines. Read More »

Gary Tooze writes:
Produced and directed by the prestigious Frank Lloyd, The Shanghai Story was promoted as a “class” production by the bread-and-butter firm of Republic Pictures. The film takes place in the eponymous far-eastern metropolis (courtesy of the Republic backlot), where Communist police chief Colonel Zorek (Marvin Miller) hopes to trap an American spy. Zorek rounds up the usual suspects and sequesters them in a seedy hotel. Could the spy be Dan Maynard (Edmond O’Brien), a cynical doctor? Is it munitions profiteer Ricki Dolmine (Barry Kelley)? Perhaps it’s two-fisted mercenary seaman Knuckles Greer (Richard Jaeckel). Orrrrrrr, maybe it’s the mysterious Rita King (Ruth Roman), who is inexplicably given permission to come and go as she pleases by the otherwise intractable Zorek. True to form, this Republic A-picture resolves its problems with a final reel of good old B-flick action and violence.Read More »

Based on Jamal Ali’s acclaimed stage play Dark Days and Light Nights, Black Joy tells the story of a naïve Guyanese immigrant who learns the hard way about life on the streets of Brixton. Presenting vivid characters, terrific action, and a superb soundtrack of soul, funk, dub and reggae, Anthony Simmons’ gritty film is an honest and insightful comic drama, exposing the lives of unemployed black Britons and immigrants in a ghettoised London.Read More »