In a series of vignettes, a partially handicapped man lives his days in anguish as he tries to find a way to leave Dhaka.Read More »

Quote:
When he started as a comedy writer for the “Late Show with David Letterman,” Steve Young had few interests outside of his day job. But while gathering material for a segment on the show, Steve stumbled onto a few vintage record albums that would change his life forever. Bizarre cast recordings – marked “internal use only” – revealed full-throated Broadway-style musical shows about some of the most recognizable corporations in America: General Electric, McDonald’s, Ford, DuPont, Xerox. Steve didn’t know much about musical theater, but these recordings delighted him in a way that nothing ever had. While tracking down rare albums, unseen footage, composers and performers, Steve forms unlikely friendships and discovers that this discarded musical genre starring tractors and bathtubs was bigger than Broadway. – Official siteRead More »

From Channel4.com:
Rossellini’s indelible career flagged in the late 1950s for a variety of complicated reasons, and after directing commercial films and an episode in Rogopag (1962) he abandoned cinema for television. Twelve years later and near the end of his life he returned to movie-making with this film. It’s a biopic of the postwar Christian Democrat leader, Alcide De Gaspari (Vannucchi), who was responsible for keeping the Communists out of power in the years that followed the fall of fascism. An extension of Rossellini’s documentary and historical reconstruction films, this failed both critically and commercially.Read More »

Plot Synopsis by Hal Erickson
Most modern-day viewers are familiar with German author Alfred Doeblin’s naturalistic novel Berlin Alexanderplatz from its epic TV miniseries presentation, directed in 1980 by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The Doeblin work was previously filmed on the very brink of the Nazi takeover in 1933, with Heinrich George as the ex-convict protagonist. Yearning for respectability, George finds he cannot escape the influence of his old criminal cohorts. When George refuses to pay “hush money” to the mob, his faithful wife Margarete Schlegel is killed. George resignedly returns to a life of crime, ultimately descending into madness. The 1933 adaptation of Berlin Alexanderplatz ran a brisk 90 minutes; Fassbinder’s 1980 TV version ran ten times longer.Read More »

Synopsis:
Sound of the Mountain is the story of the love between a daughter-in-law Kikuko (Setsuko Hara) and the father Shingo (So Yamamura) of her neglectful and selfish husband (Ken Uehara). Kikuko is locked into a loveless marriage. They live with his parents, and she is closest to her father in law. Kikuko doesn’t complain while her husband is having an affair. You want her to confront him, but she doesn’t. Kikuko finds out she is pregnant, doesn’t tell anyone and gets an abortion. As Shingo becomes more aware of Kikuko’s unhappiness, he takes ever more unconventional steps to rescue his son’s marriage.Read More »

La Bataille du Rail (Battle of the Rails) is regarded by many cineastes as the one truly great French “resistance” film. Based on fact, the episodic plotline details the courageous efforts by French railray workers to sabotage Nazi reinforcement-troop trains. The film’s thesis is that this underground activity was largely responsible for the allied victory on D-Day. Writer-director Rene Clement enhanced the reality of the story by filming on actual locations and using genuine railway employees and resistance fighters in the cast. Admittedly slow going at times, La Bataille du Rail is more successful as a morale-booster than as pure entertainment.Read More »

Quote:
One of the defining works of the Czech New Wave was the portmanteau film Pearls from the Deep (Perlicky na dne, 1965). Not only did it bring five key directors of the Wave (Chytilova, Jires, Menzel, Nemec and Schorm) together in one film, making it the Wave’s official “coming out” as a group, but it tied them to a writer, Bohumil Hrabal, whose ability to capture the rhythms and refrains of everyday spoken Czech was highly influential on the Wave’s directionRead More »

Synopsis:
Based on the best-selling manga series, the six intensely kinetic Lone Wolf and Cub films elevated chanbara to bloody new heights. The shogun’s executioner, Itto Ogami (Tomisaburo Wakayama), takes to wandering the countryside as an assassin—along with his infant son Daigoro (Akihiro Tomikawa) and a seemingly infinitely weaponized perambulator—helping those he encounters while seeking vengeance for his murdered wife. Delivering stylish thrills and a body count that defies belief, Lone Wolf and Cub is beloved for its brilliantly choreographed action sequences as well as its tender depiction of the bonds between a parent and a child.Read More »

Synopsis:
Based on the best-selling manga series, the six intensely kinetic Lone Wolf and Cub films elevated chanbara to bloody new heights. The shogun’s executioner, Itto Ogami (Tomisaburo Wakayama), takes to wandering the countryside as an assassin—along with his infant son Daigoro (Akihiro Tomikawa) and a seemingly infinitely weaponized perambulator—helping those he encounters while seeking vengeance for his murdered wife. Delivering stylish thrills and a body count that defies belief, Lone Wolf and Cub is beloved for its brilliantly choreographed action sequences as well as its tender depiction of the bonds between a parent and a child.Read More »