Synopsis:
Tsuneo is a university student working part-time in a mah-jong parlour. Lately the customers have been talking about an old lady who pushes a baby carriage through the streets. They say she is carrying something for a crime syndicate, and they wonder what it is she has in the carriage. Money? Drugs? One day, the owner of the mah-jong parlour sends Tsuneo out to walk his dog. A baby carriage comes rolling down a hill and crashes into a guard rail. The old lady asks him to look into the carriage, where he finds a young woman clutching a knife. This is how Tsuneo first meets the girl who calls herself Josée.Read More »

Mannequin hands hold a pair of dice. A castle is perched on a hilltop. Below it, a posh, modern villa. Meanwhile, far from Paris, two men with masked faces play dice in a bar. They decide to drive to Paris. Country roads, hills, fences. The posh “chateau” appears again: meticulous garden, fancy interior, odd sculptures. And at home? “No one, NO ONE.” For the next two days, masked figures play dice, frolic by the pool, perform exercises with a ball. Two new figures arrive. Masked. They search and find the dice. They dance. Mannequin hands hold a pair of dice.Read More »

London-based Millionairess Epifania (Sophia Loren) is attracted to Dr. Kabir (MD from Delhi and PhD from Calcutta), who is more intent on treating patients. When she persists, he confides in her that he had made a commitment to his late widowed seamstress mother that he will wed any woman who will manage to survive on just Rs.500/-, for 90 days. She finds out that this sum is equivalent to just 35 shillings but readily accepts this challenge. She also informs him that her late father had also imposed a condition that she must wed a male who will turn £500 into £15000 within the same period. Epifania then finds employment with an Italian firm, ends up re-organizing, and turning up the firm’s profits. At the end of 90 days, she goes to meet Kabir and discovers that he has not only given all the money away but also has no interest whatsoever in marrying her.Read More »

A Parisian experimenter with Lumiere’s Kinematograph (Charles Denner) dies in WW1, and his son (Charles Denner) grows to be a man who barely survives WW2 in a concentration camp. He marries another refugee (Marthe Keller) who dies in childbirth, leaving him a daugher, Sarah, who at age 16 (Marthe Keller) is a spoiled debutante hopelessly in love with pop singer Gilbert Bécaud (Gilbert Bécaud) she goes through the 60s trying every fad while her father wishes she’d settle down. Meanwhile, sneak thief Simon Duroc (André Dussollier) winds up in prison, where he slowly turns his devious energies to their least-antisocial use: filmmaking.Read More »

Quote:
This French anthology is a tribute to A Propos de Nice (1930), a classic documentary that took a poetic and sometimes satirical look at life in the French Riviera town. This version blends fact and fiction to chronicle life in modern-day Nice and is comprised of seven vignettes, each directed by an internationally renowned filmmaker. Only one of the episodes, “Reperages,” from Iranian directors Abbas Kiarostami and Parviz Kimiavi, stays close to the style of the original film by Jean Vigo as it chronicles the experiences of a filmmaker who came to Nice to do research on Vigo for his upcoming documentary. Read More »

Quote:
Though he was very much a member of the community of filmmakers who graduated from FAMU and went on to shake things up during the sixties, Evald Schorm also stood apart from the rest. Like his fellow directors, he was using the medium to get at the absurdity of life in Communist Czechoslovakia, but Schorm was dedicated to a more direct, realistic type of filmmaking than his friends Věra Chytilová, Jan Němec, and Jiří Menzel, who readily turned to whimsy, fantasy, and comedy. Referred to as both the philosopher and the conscience of the New Wave, Schorm, whose relatively sober style has been called documentary-like (his focus at FAMU was nonfiction filmmaking) and received comparisons to that of Antonioni, explored themes of morality and the malaise of the socialist middle class (such income-based social strata did exist in Czechoslovakia), and preferred psychological portraiture.Read More »

In the months following the terrorist attacks in Paris, the youth has taken the night. A community has risen, that looks for belonging in a world they don’t understand and seek to change the rules. Led by new faces and unheard groups, with their values and ideals, they open a new dialog, challenge the state and get ready for a new kind of revolution.Read More »

Veteran gangster Gustave (Lino Ventura) escapes from prison to find his sister is being blackmailed by some petty thugs in this crime thriller. He plans one last caper to steal enough money in hopes of retiring to a tropical paradise. He and his gang are sought by a detective (Paul Meurisse), the cop who plays by the book and avoids the sadistic torture practiced by his less-honorable cohorts. Soon Gustave is caught between the police and the double-crossing gangsters and discovers too late that there is no honor among thieves.Read More »

Quote:
The hero of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead is Howard Roark (Gary Cooper), a fiercely independent architect obviously patterned after Frank Lloyd Wright. Rather than compromise his ideals, Roark takes menial work as a quarryman to finance his projects. He falls in love with heiress Dominique (Patricia Neal), but ends the relationship when he has the opportunity to construct buildings according to his own wishes. Dominique marries a newspaper tycoon (Raymond Massey) who at first conducts a vitriolic campaign against the “radical” Roark, but eventually becomes his strongest supporter. Upon being given a public-housing contract on the proviso that his plans not be changed in any way, Roark is aghast to learn that his designs will be radically altered. Roark sneaks into the unfinished structure at night, makes certain no one else is around, and dynamites the project into oblivion.Read More »