Synopsis:
Just before Christmas, Joe Miracle, a returning WWII war hero, comes home to learn that gangster Barney Teener has taken over his nightclub and murdered Joe’s partner. Joe loots the club’s safe for $100,000 and then finds sanctuary in a settlement house ran by Jenny Jones. Mistaking him for a down-and-out musician, she helps him understand the importance of her work. “Early” Byrd, a newspaper columnist, learns Joe’s true identity and writes a column that puts Barney on his trail. The gangsters recover the money, after setting fire to the settlement house, but Joe steals it again, and returns to the gutted welfare house disguised as Santa Claus, and gives the money to Jenny to rebuild. There, Tenner and his gang catch up to Joe.Read More »

Synopsis:
Nine members of the same family go to an island, where nobody lives – but the head of the family owns a nice house there. Problem is that he and his three sons keep a dark secret, and this dark secret begins to haunt them as soon as they are on the island. One by one falls victim to a mysterious killer.Read More »

Quote:
This fascinating and unique film is unfortunately almost entirely unknown in the West. The girl Doris S. leaves East Germany in 1961 to join her father in West Germany. Three years later, she returns and tells the camera why she returned. The reason is simple: West Germany is a country or moral and sexual corruption, full of bars, American soldiers, American cars, alcohol, and prostitution. Doris S. succumbed to both commercial sex and drinking, but finally decided to return to clean living in East Germany. Clearly designed to discourage actual or potential emigration from East into West Germany, the film nevertheless operates on a second, unintended level as well. For in this lengthy interview, Doris reveals non-verbal and unmistakable signs of fear and coercion, reinforced by the stentorian, Prussian style of the interviewer (rather, cross-examiner).Read More »

When oil engineer Sami (Roushdy Abaza) starts digging for oil in Luxor, he disturbs the spirits of the ancient Egyptians buried beneath the ground. The spirits decide to send him the last bride of the Nile, Hamees (Lobna Abdel Aziz) to stop him. Will Hamees succeed or will modern technology destroy the ancient civilization?Read More »

Movie in 4 episodes, taken from as many short stories by Luigi Pirandello.

1) “La giara”: in order to repair the jar of quarrelsome Don Lolò, zi ‘Dima remains locked inside it;

2) “Il ventaglino”: an unwed mother spends the first money received in charity to buy a fan;

3) “La patente”: a jinx requires that he be officially recognized, with a licence, his ability to bring bad luck;

4) “Marsina stretta”: the anger for a too tight tailcoat induces a best man to make celebrate a wedding that the groom’s rich parents were trying to avoid.Read More »

Synopsis:
A documentary analyzing the role of the modern American media and its effects on democracy.

Review:
The middle child to Joel Bakan and Harold Crooks’s The Corporation and Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, Robert Kane Pappas’s Orwell Rolls in His Grave is an expert piece of investigative journalism that likens our media system to a subsidiary of our country’s corporate process. Polemically, Pappas’s incendiary media watchdog is closer in tone to Moore’s anti-Bush rant, but aesthetically it shares more in common with Bakan and Crooks’s Power-Point-ish exposé of corporate greed.Read More »

Plot:
The professional mercenary Sir William Walker instigates a slave revolt on the Caribbean island of Queimada in order to help improve the British sugar trade. Years later he is sent again to deal with the same rebels that he built up because they have seized too much power that now threatens British sugar interests.Read More »

Fortress Europe is the latest semi-documentary film by Zilnik and was shot on the borders between Slovenia and Italy, Croatia and Slovenia and Hungary and Austria—i.e. the southern area covered by the Schengen Treaty governing the transit of migrants in Europe. As Zilnik notes in the accompanying interview, this new “wall” against the movement of people is more impenetrable than the Berlin wall.Read More »

An Artist violently grinds stones and uses the sand to create animated drawings. His first picture is the Garden of Eden. Once Eve becomes pregnant, all the tribulations of the real world are unleashed upon her. She follows through dream-like sequences populated with crying birds, brick-wall-faced bureaucrats and pensive philosophers in seemingly petrified poses. Irritated, repressed and allured by each other, the creatures on the screen start living a life of their own. Gradually, a dark climax builds up. Will the Artist himself be able to handle so much emotional intensity? Written by helge79Read More »