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João Vuvu, a widower with no family, except for a son who is doing time for a double murder and an armed bank robbery, lives alone in his own, large, sunny house in an old wealthy neighborhood of Lisbon.
Filmed as he was terminally ill, Come and Go is Monteiro’s minimal goodbye to a cinema—and a city, Lisbon—he loved. “João Vuvu” (Monteiro) is an elderly libertine who spends his days riding the creaking trams up and down Lisbon’s streets, feeding birds the wrong things in leafy-green parks, speaking alternately poetically, philosophically, and illicitly to the poorly paid women who clean his apartment, and discussing art, literature, politics, and more with various strangers and apparitions. Read More »

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A Maori tribesman named Toa discovers bunch of white soldiers in 18th century uniforms and Maori warriors who have just slaughtered each other. One white soldier is still alive, and Toa wants to finish him off for revenge. He is warned however by a little bird in a tree he calls his “spirit bird” (that would be “Waldvogel” in German, but Toa and the bird only speak Maori). Toa’s spear and a wooden statue go up in flames, the rock he wants to smash the soldier’s head with crumbles to dust. Toa listens to the bird’s warning and nurses the soldier back to health. Both men are completely naked all the time, they fool around, occasionally the soldier shouts English phrases at Toa. Finally the soldier manages to seduce Toa which he had been trying for some time. Then they separate, the soldier discovers the little spirit bird strangled to death in a trap, a premonition for the film’s cruel end.Read More »

In 1944 falangist Spain, a girl, fascinated with fairy-tales, is sent along with her pregnant mother to live with her new stepfather, a ruthless captain of the Spanish army. During the night, she meets a fairy who takes her to an old faun in the center of the labyrinth. He tells her she’s a princess, but must prove her royalty by surviving three gruesome tasks. If she fails, she will never prove herself to be the the true princess and will never see her real father, the king, again.Read More »

Summary by Paul Gaita:
The premise behind the Up series is deceptively simple: take a cross-section of children at age 7, ask them about their hopes for the future, and then return every seven years to mark their progress. However, the results of these experiments, launched in 1963 by Britain’s Granada Television, are anything but mundane, and their revelations about society, maturation, and the human condition were compiled into seven extraordinary films.Read More »

Synopsis: In 1919 workers arrive by train in the middle of the Taiga in order to construct a town. They fell trees and unload bricks from the train for that purpose. The newly arrived hero Vasilij is made chief of the depot, meets hostility and has to put down corruption. (In one scene he searches the the foreman and finds a few nails hidden in his pocket.) Vasilij shares a cabin with other workers and a couple who sleep in a corner of the room behind a curtain. He falls in love with the woman and secretly meets her and makes her pregnant. Read More »

Criterion wrote:
A complex exploration of the physical and emotional effects of trauma, Something Wild stars Carroll Baker, in a layered performance, as a college student who attempts suicide after a brutal sexual assault but is stopped by a mechanic (Ralph Meeker)—whose kindness, however, soon takes an unsettling turn. Startlingly modern in its frankness and psychological realism, the film represents one of the purest on-screen expressions of the sensibility of the intimate community of artists around New York’s Actors Studio, which transformed American cinema in the mid-twentieth century. With astonishing location and claustrophobic interior photography by Eugene Schüfftan, an opening-title sequence by the inimitable Saul Bass, and a rhythmic score by Aaron Copland, Jack Garfein’s film is a masterwork of independent cinema.Read More »

A Man lives in his car. He is 40 years old and although he does not have a lot of free time, when he does, he chooses to spend it with his family. He meets his wife and two children at a specified day and time in car parking lots. His job is to locate and bring the finest honey to a 50-year old man. A New Driver shows up and the Man gets fired. The Man’s life changes and he finds it absurd that no one trusts him anymore.Read More »

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It is already a challenge to make a film on death and call it Living. But Sigarev fearlessly gets to the very heart of things, where life, death, God, love and the imagination form an indestructible whole. A harsh and sometimes brutal experience, but catharsis will follow.

Vasily Sigarev’s second feature, after his acclaimed Wolfy, is an existential portrait of protagonists living in a wintry Russian province. A mother wants to reunite with her twin daughters. A young couple marry in church, but immediately after the ceremony, God – or maybe the Devil, or maybe Blind Fate – tests their love in the most brutal way. A boy wants to see his estranged father, despite his mother’s violent protests. Each of these characters lives through their own ordeal.Read More »

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A classic and endlessly watchable love story that never dates Inspired by the novel of acclaimed writer Cengiz Aytmatov, Atif Yilmaz adapts one of history’s greatest love stories to the screen with the greatest finesse. It is said, in fact, that the French poet Aragon described The Girl With The Red Scarf as “the world’s greatest love story”.Read More »