After the untimely death of his mother, a teenager befriends his charismatic but troubled next-door neighbor and becomes embroiled in a world of addiction and violence just as the opioid epidemic takes hold of their small town.Read More »

Synopsis
Valerie (Susan Traylor) is still reeling from the death of her husband, though her family thinks she ought to be over it by now. Once a painter with an academic position, she’s started working in an LA grocery store, where she declines a promotion. After driving her husband’s old VW bus to Palm Springs, she meets Tim (Jay Underwood), who’s desperate to become more than a one-night stand. This darkly comic, exceptionally moving character study has drama, revelation, and expertly drawn secondary characters, but its power comes from Traylor’s fearless, idiosyncratic performance and a deeply expressionist production design that makes nearly every object as evocative as the desert landscape where Valerie tries to paint again. John Putch directed a screenplay by Robert Tilem; with songs by Kathleen Wilhoite.
Lisa Alspector, Chicago ReaderRead More »

While draining a small lake to make room for a new housing development, a crew finds the wreckage of an old missing Cold War-era British Air Force bomber, with the remains of the pilot at the controls. An investigator assigned by British Military Intelligence to find out what happened soon discovers that there’s more to the incident than there appears to be, and it involves smuggling, the black market, the Russian KGB, the Nazi SS and a series of murders.Read More »

Quote:
A bowl of blueberries in milk, changing light radiant on the berries and on the glazed bowl, the ever more radiant orb of milk transforming into glowing light itself, with a brief shadow coda answering the complex play of shadows. The regular pulses of light framing the looser rhythmus of the spoon, itself a frame. A charging of each of the frame’s edges with its own particular energy. Within and without, whites and blues, lines and curves. The pulses of vision, the simple natural processes, lift the spirit.Read More »

To the priest in a small Italian town, the Splendor cinema (now sold for redevelopment) is a ‘dark grotto of sin’; to owner Jordan (Mastroianni), it’s a shrine. But writer/director Scola is more concerned with the grey areas between such views: the patrons who desert cinema in droves when TV offers cheap, undemanding entertainment. Using flashback and clips, he conveys something of the medium’s superiority over the box, at the same time beautifully unravelling a tale of life-long devotion and hard graft from Jordan, his long-term lover/usherette (Vlady), and the projectionist (Troisi). Their temperamental relationships over two decades are conveyed with great affection by the accomplished cast; and the film is full of wonderful moments – such as the homage to Capra at the climax – which manage to be both magical and unsentimental.Read More »

In the middle of the Spanish Golden Age, a Castilian convent is about to be closed and the nuns residing there dispersed. Then, one of the sisters comes up with a saving idea that could restore well-being to the community: to pretend that she has stigmata on her hands.Read More »

When a world champion of sport stacking is dumped by his long-time girlfriend, he has to learn basic adulting skills in order to live alone and take care of himself.Read More »

Visconti’s retelling of the Electra story starts with Sandra/Electra (Cardinale) returning to her ancestral home in Italy – and reviving an intimate involvement with her brother (Sorel) which troubles her naive American husband (Craig) – on the eve of an official ceremony commemorating the death of her Jewish father in a Nazi concentration camp. As ever with Visconti, he is ambivalently drawn to the decadent society he is ostensibly criticising; and Armando Nannuzzi’s camera lovingly caresses the creaking old mansion, set in a landscape of crumbling ruins, where the incestuous siblings determine to wreak revenge on the mother (Bell) and stepfather (Ricci) who supposedly denounced their father. Something like a Verdi opera without the music, the result may not quite achieve tragedy, but it looks marvellous. The title, culled from a poem by Leopardi, has been better rendered as ‘Twinkling Stars of the Bear’.Read More »

Aboard a ship late in the 19th-century, a middle-aged Italian tells his story of love to a Russian. In a series of flashbacks filmed almost entirely in creams, whites, and ochers, the clownish and superfluous Romano Patroni leaves his wife’s opulent home to visit a spa where he falls in love with a Russian woman whose marriage is a horror. He pursues her into the Russian heartland and returns to Italy resolved to leave his wife and marry his love.Read More »