• John Paddy Carstairs – Up in the World (1956)

    1951-1960ClassicsComedyJohn Paddy CarstairsUnited Kingdom

    Norman is a window cleaner who has to clean a manor house with hundreds of windows. He is distracted by the son of the house who persuades him to go into town. When some villains try and kidnap the young heir Norman fights them off but the heir has banged his head and can’t remember Norman’s heroic stand.Read More »

  • Anja Kirschner & David Panos – The Last Days of Jack Sheppard (2009)

    2001-2010Anja KirschnerArthouseDavid PanosExperimentalUnited Kingdom

    The Last Days of Jack Sheppard is based on the inferred prison encounters between the 18th century criminal Jack Sheppard and Daniel Defoe, ghostwriter of Sheppard’s ‘autobiography’. Set in the wake of the South Sea Bubble of 1720, Britain’s first financial crisis, the film is a critical costume drama constructed from a patchwork of historical, literary, and popular sources. It explores the connections between representation, speculation and the discourses of high and low culture that emerged in the early 18th century and remain relevant to the present day.Read More »

  • Daryush Shokof – Seven Servants (1996)

    1991-2000ArthouseDaryush ShokofGermanyPhilosophy

    AMG: A very strange dream about a wealthy man preparing for death inspired director Daryush Shokof to make this off-beat and highly esoteric art film. Archie (Anthony Quinn) receives inner peace by being touched by people of four different racial groups. The film shows the five of them conducting daily activities as Quinn endures having their fingers in his nose and ears constantly for 10 days. Archie invites two old friends of his to be present at his death and reveals his secret for inner peace to them. The man goes off in a huff, but the woman stays around and finds her own enjoyment in the situation.Read More »

  • Nicholas Ray & Wim Wenders – Lightning Over Water [+ Extras] (1980)

    1971-1980ArthouseDocumentaryNicholas RaySwedenWim Wenders

    Lightning Over Water is a penetrating and touching film of the last days of cult American director Nicholas Ray, most well-known for Rebel Without a Cause.

    .”I knew that he wanted to work, to die working”, Wim Wenders says in the movie. And through his work with Wenders and the crew, Ray transformed his dying into an act of collaboration and a work of art.

    Dying slowly of terminal cancer, Ray chose not to institutionalize himself in a hospice and fade away in an old people’s home but stayed in his modest New York City loft, surrounded by his closest friends — a sharp and poignant contrast to the comparative luxury of his Hollywood years.Read More »

  • Wim Wenders – Don’t Come Knocking (2005)

    2001-2010ArthouseDramaFranceWim Wenders

    Quote:
    With Don’t Come Knocking, Wim Wenders revisits territory, both literal and metaphorical, first explored in Paris, Texas. Not only does he return to the Southwest, but Sam Shepard is back as co-writer. This time, he’s also the star. His Howard Spence is a movie cowboy who’s had enough. One day while working in Monument Valley, he takes off his boots and hops a train to Nevada to see his mother (Eva Marie Saint, lovely as ever). Little does he know that Sutter (Tim Roth), a by-the-books bondsman, is hot on his trail. Next, Spence travels to Montana where a sad young woman named Sky (Sarah Polley) is recovering from a recent death, while an angry young man named Earl (Gabriel Mann), who sounds much like Chris Isaak, plies the troubadour trade. Spence doesn’t know it yet, but they’re the results of a rambunctious past that will soon “come knocking,” as it were. Read More »

  • Claire Denis – White Material (2009)

    2001-2010Claire DenisDramaFrance

    Quote:
    A textured panorama of modern day Africa’s dynamic and volatile cross-cultural landscape, Claire Denis’s White Material is an abstract and elemental, if oddly sterile rumination on colonial legacy and socioeconomic stagnation. Unfolding in episodic flashbacks as second-generation coffee plantation owner, Maria Vial (Isabelle Huppert) scrambles to make her way back home after a forced evacuation of European settlers in light of an escalating civil war, the film structurally interweaves the parallel lives of the Vial family, a band of roving child soldiers scouring the countryside for “white material” trophies from fleeing settlers, and a charismatic military officer turned rebel leader known as the Boxer (Isaach De Bankolé) who has gone into hiding to recover from injuries sustained during a recent skirmish.Read More »

  • David Hare – Paris by Night (1988)

    1981-1990CrimeDavid HareDramaUnited Kingdom

    Clara Bell is a busy Euro MP with a husband and child at home and a high powered career – but on a trip to Paris her ordered existence is overturned by a murder and a chance encounter.
    Read More »

  • Slatan Dudow – Zeitprobleme: wie der Arbeiter wohnt AKA How the Berlin Worker Lives (1930)

    1921-1930DocumentaryGermanyShort FilmSlatan DudowWeimar Republic cinema

    Synopsis:
    This documentary shows how the Berliner workers lived in 1930. The director Slatan Dudow shows through images: a) the workers leaving the factory; b) the raise of the rents; c) the “unpleasant” guest, meaning the justice officer that brings the eviction notice; d) the fight of classes of the houses of capitalists and working classes; e) the parks of the working class; f) the houses of the working class, origin of the tuberculosis and the victims; g) the playground of the working class; h) the swimming pool for the working class, ironically called the “Baltic Sea” of the working class; i) the effects of humidity of basement where a family lives, with one member deaf; j) one working class family having dinner while the capitalist baths his dog; k) the eviction notice received from an unemployed family and their eviction.Read More »

  • Nadine Labaki – Sukkar banat (2007)

    2001-2010ComedyDramaLebanonNadine Labaki

    Plot
    A romantic comedy centered on the daily lives of five Lebanese women living in Beirut. Layal (Nadine Labaki) works in a beauty salon in Beirut along with 3 other women. Each one has a problem: Layal has a relationship with a married man, Nisrine (Yasmine Al Masri) who is no more a virgin, will soon be married, Rima (Joanna Moukarzel) is lesbian and Jamal (Gisèle Aouad) is worried about getting old. Rose (Sihame Haddad), a tailor with a shop next to the salon, is an old lady who devoted her life to take care of her older sister, have found her first love.Read More »

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