from AMG
After laboring in obscurity for several years, French filmmaker Claude Sautet finally struck a responsive chord with moviegoers in Les Choses de la Vie. The plot isn’t much: the hero, businessman Michel Piccoli, must choose between his wife and his mistress, two women whom he loves with equal fervor. It is what Sautet does with the material that lifts the film above the ordinary. The director puts the central character’s plight in context with his ongoing concerns over his job, his income, and his relationship with his family. In Choses de la Vie Sautet has nothing but the warmest feelings for his characters, which results in more three-dimensionality that might normally be expected in so banal a plotline.Read More »

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Roddy, first son of the rich Berwick family, is expelled from school when he takes the blame for his friend Tim’s theft. His family sends him away and all of his friends leave him alone. Roddy decides to go to Paris where he spends what little money he has and starts working as a dancer. He soon becames a victim of alcoholism. Roddy manages to move to England’s colonies but some sailors send him back to his rich family hoping for a reward.Read More »

Four women. All in their 30s. Three married, one divorcee. They are able to tell each other anything. Or at least they thought. One day, after losing in divorce court, one of them gives up on a future with their partner and disappears. The three remaining women take a second look at their lives. The long night is full of questions. “Are you really the you you wanted to be?”Read More »

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After being forced to shoot a friend in a duel, fast-gun Randolph Scott swears to take off his gunbelt forever but finds himself drawn to the middle of a range war when he’s blamed for the murder of his best friend. Now Scott must prove to the dead man’s kid brother (John Miles) that he’s innocent. Naturally, Scott is forced to strap on guns once more to bring an end to the tyranny of local land baron Griff Barnett, his devious foreman Bruce Cabot, hired gunslinger Forrest Tucker (in a really underwritten, wasted role) and mean, crooked deputy Grant Withers. To complicate matters, Scott becomes involved with the land baron’s two daughters, nice girl Dorothy Hart and conniving Barbara Britton who is in love with Cabot. Alan Le May’s script from Zane Grey’s TWIN SOMBREROS seems to need a bit more “polish”, but Scott is terrific as always, plus the gorgeous Sedona locations (abetted by Vasquez Rocks, Jauregui Ranch and Monogram Ranch) in Cinecolor are enough to recommend this one.Read More »

Do you still remember how, long ago, we trained our thoughts? Most often we’d start from a dream. We wondered how, in total darkness, colours of such intensity could emerge within us. In a soft, low voice. Saying great things. Surprising, deep and accurate matters. Image and words. Like a bad dream written on a stormy night. Under western eyes. The lost paradises. War is here.Read More »

A story about young orphan girl who was rejected by her mother. The film won the Golden Leopard at the Locarno International Film Festival in 1970. Read More »

With a poem consisting of twenty names of towns in Minas Gerais, Brazil, the film gains in rhythmic body and is open to the unforeseen and to the improvised. Intrigued by the names of these towns, the team for the first time goes through each of them. In a movement of immersion and submersion, the documentary is made by means of two layers of narrative – one consisting of the history of the poem and the other, of commonplace events that accidentally arise before the camera in each one of these cities. Open perception, to allow one to blend in with day-to-day life in each place, and alertness, to pinpoint any one event that can possibly relate to the poem and that can reveal to what extent life is unpredictable and accidental.Read More »

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Ray Hicks (Nolte) is an ex-Marine who served in Vietnam first in combat and now as a merchant seaman, which allows him to come and go between Vietnam and the US. This provides him a unique opportunity to smuggle things from Southeast Asia to home, but he’s never done anything like the request from his journalist friend John Converse (Michael Moriarty, in another laid back but outstanding performance): bring 2 kilos of pure heroin from Vietnam and deliver it to his wife at home, and collect a cool 10 grand for his efforts.Read More »

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Set in central France, the film follows French resistance fighters who press the battle on the Germans. Along the way, they break into a prison and release some German prisoners, but discover there may be a spy deliberately planted to flush them all out.Read More »