At some point, everyone has asked the question, why is it so hard to find love? In this final installment of the autobiographical trilogy that includes Vinyl and I, Curmudgeon, Alan Zweig reflects with disarming candour on why, if he longs for a partner and children, he is still single at mid-life.Read More »
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Carefully observed and beautifully shot, the film that launched American Zoetrope 40 years ago is an early herald of Coppola’s talent for crafting delicate narratives that actors can sink their teeth into. Natalie (Shirley Knight) is a Long Island housewife trapped in a loveless marriage and stifled by domesticity. Two months pregnant and unable to bear her humdrum existence, she hits the road on a quest for freedom that Roger Ebert dubbed the “mirror image” of Easy Rider.Read More »
Synopsis
“IMDb wrote:
Violante, a young and beautiful catholic nun, is facing a few marital issues with her husband Jesus Christ – who stalks her through the dark corners of a decaying convent and seeks to punish her for her (alleged) sins. In a dark stormy night they struggle to win each other to their personal points of view. She quotes the bible in terms of unconditional love – He does the same in terms of capital punishment. But are His manly insecurities based on solid grounds? After escaping His jealous rage, the nun lurks through the dark alleys and the bars like a vampire. Doomed to loneliness, all she wants is a Man. And who can this Man be?Read More »
Allmovie Synopsis:
After the highly acclaimed independent film Bottle Rocket, director Wes Anderson followed up with a quirky Touchstone Studios film entitled Rushmore. Written by Anderson and friend Owen Wilson (an actor in Armageddon and Anaconda), they created the story of Max Fischer, a highly eccentric 15-year-old boy who attends the tenth grade at Rushmore Academy. Played by Jason Schwartzman (Talia Shire’s son and Francis Ford Coppola’s nephew), Max is a poor student with big dreams and a love of extracurricular activities. Read More »
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Melodrama with fairytale elements about an urban beauty in Kyrgyzia who is kidnapped during a visit to the countryside and then has to marry a shepherd according to local tradition.
For decades it was common in Kyrgyzstan for single women to be kidnapped so they could become brides for local bachelors, and a couple discovers this still takes place in this comedy-drama. Asema (Asem Toktobekova) was born and raised in the big city, so she experiences a bit of culture shock when her fiancée Murat (Siezdbek Iskenaliev) takes her to the small village in the country where he was born to meet his parents. Read More »
“A VIVIDLY EXECUTED PIECE OF PROVOCATION”
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A key film in the unimpeachable cry-in-the-wilderness corpus of Peter Watkins—a major filmography long marginalized and only now being prepped and released on any form of video— Punishment Park (1971) is an act of howling political righteousness, a dystopian critique intended for the peace-movement years but possibly even more relevant today. The premise is so simple it leaves singe marks: Watkins begins with the very real McCarran Act (just as he had based The War Game on Britain’s own nuclear-warfare cost analysis and contingency plans), which grants Ashcroftian summary-judgment powers to the president in times of potential “insurrection.” The Nixon-‘Nam years were those times, and so the film follows two groups of arrested protesters as they’re led to the Western desert, interrogated by a tribunal and then sent running, with national guardsmen and riot police following on the hunt.Read More »
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A small-time dealer dreams of another life but can’t afford it. To escape, he must accept one last job involving Spain, drugs, the Illuminati and his overbearing mother.Read More »
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Jakubiskos debut, by many considered his best movie. The title can be translated as “The Crucial Years”, but literally it is “The Christ Years”, based on the idiomatic notion that a man should accomplish something in life before he reaches the age of Jesus when he was crucified. The film surely has some autobiographical elements, as it is about a beginning artist from Eastern Slovakia who lives and works in Prague.Read More »
She purchased a ticket of no return to Berlin-Tegel. She wanted to forget her past, or rather to abandon it like a condemned house. She wanted to concentrate all her energies on one thing, something all her own. To follow her own destiny at last was her only desire. Berlin, a city in which she was a complete stranger, seemed just the place to indulge her passion undisturbed. Her passion was alcohol, she lived to drink and drank to live, the life of a drunkard. Her resolve to live out a narcissistic, pessimistic cult of solitude strengthened during her flight until it reached the level at which it could be lived. The time was ripe to put her plans into action.Read More »