

Quote:
A scientist & inventor in 1907, Dr Plonk, predicts that the world will end in 101 years, unless something is done about it. A comedy in the Charlie Chaplin / Buster Keaton tradition.Read More »


Quote:
A scientist & inventor in 1907, Dr Plonk, predicts that the world will end in 101 years, unless something is done about it. A comedy in the Charlie Chaplin / Buster Keaton tradition.Read More »

Summary:
Coming back from an extended business trip, Frank discovers that his girlfriend Janie is now working at a new resort hotel where the owner has given her a permanent place to stay, as well as other gifts, in exchange for her affections. In the course of fighting over this development, tensions between Frank and Janie escalate out of control until he is holding her hostage in a standoff with the police. As the negotiators try to talk Frank into giving himself up, the desperate man feels himself being pushed further and further into a corner.Read More »

Tierra (Earth, Julio Medem, 1996) opens with a hypnotic journey through space, as the camera soars through the ethereal atmosphere, descending towards an agricultural area, then focusing in on a lone traveler who is having a motivational conversation with himself. A remote village has been infested with woodlice, imparting an earthy taste to the locally produced wine. An exterminator, a self-described “complex” man named Ángel (Carmelo Gómez), has been hired by the town mayor to fumigate the region. Ángel’s inner voice, the figurative angel of his subconscious who has died but continues to exist (and interject opinions) within his corporal self, believes that he has been sent down to earth for a divine mission.Read More »


Dalí considered Luminous Procuress ‘a work of genius’. Featuring members of legendary San Francisco performance troupe The Cockettes, the film was directed by the artist and filmmaker Steven Arnold, a muse and model of Dalí’s. Dalí always referred to Arnold as his ‘prince’, and allegedly co-produced (or at least partly funded) the film, for which he held an elaborate screening at the St. Regis Hotel in New York. Andy Warhol and numerous luminaries of New York society attended the spectacular event, and Dalí projected the film upside down, backwards and sideways. The Village Voice called the film ‘a tour de force of the imagination – a journey through peekboxes of naked tableaux, theatres of mechanical dreams, feasts of monsters and piles of humanity.’Read More »

Quote:
Philippe Seigner, a charming business school graduate from the French Pyrenees, starts his career in business consulting at the posh Paris seat of McGregor. His first serious task is a delicate one, an audit at the Janson food cans factory in the provinces, which is about to be taken over. As he soon realizes, this will mean sacking about 80 employees, as his boss Hugo Paradis knew from the start. However, his Paris girl friend reproaches him collaborating with ruthless capitalism, as if any of the downsizing could be stopped or mitigated by him bowing out. Nevertheless, as he gets to knew the threatened staff better he considers risking his career when his boss orders him to chose who should go. Meanwhile the factory staff starts realizing what’s about to happening.Read More »

Quote:
The husband and wife team of director Jules Dassin and actress Melina Mercouri, who first enjoyed international success with the comedy Never on Sunday, collaborated for the last time on this powerful drama. Maya (Melina Mercouri) is a famous actress who is returning to the stage for a production of the classic Greek tragedy Medea, in which she will play the title character, a mother who murders her children. Kostas (Andreas Voutsinas), Maya’s former lover, will be directing Maya in the production, and when he discovers that Brenda (Ellen Burstyn), an American woman, is housed in a nearby Greek prison for killing her offspring, he suggests that Maya should meet Brenda as a means of better understanding her character. Read More »


Quote:
Not really epic material, this is a fated romantic drama (a typically French quality) set against the exotic background of the Foreign Legion and, actually, a remake of Jacques Feyder’s 1934 film LE GRAND JEU.
The plot involves a successful young lawyer (Jean-Claude Pascal) who, due to a shady deal, finds himself penniless and separated from his wife (Gina Lollobrigida). Stranded in Algeria, he’s persuaded to join the Foreign Legion where he befriends a couple of similar losers (played by Raymond Pellegrin and Peter van Eyck). Read More »


Quote:
Routine Pleasures makes of its investigation of “men and imagination” in 1980s America “a small-scale epic,” in Gorin’s words, a remake of Only Angels Have Wings (Howard Hawks, 1939). Gorin’s principal subject is a group of model train enthusiasts who meet weekly at the Del Mar Fairgrounds in Southern California: their miniature landscapes preserve a lost, perhaps illusory America, and their obsession curiously entwines work and childhood. Gorin weaves this subject with another: his friend and mentor Manny Farber. Farber doesn’t appear, except in photographs; but his paintings and words (and such preoccupations as Jimmy Cagney) do; and Gorin, again assuming the persona of bemused investigator, shuttles between these strands with effortless ingenuity.Read More »