9 Fingers opens like in a film noir: at night, in a train station, a man called Magloire runs from a police control. With no luggage and no future. No sooner has he found a huge amount of money than trouble begins. A gang on his heels will soon make him a hostage then an accomplice. It is Kurtz’s gang. After an aborted break-in, they all have to flee aboard a cargo ship with a dangerous volatile freight. Nothing happens as it was supposed to be – poison and madness contaminate everybody. Kurtz’s men seem to be the pawns of a conspiracy led by the mysterious “9 Fingers”…Read More »

Plot:
Will Rogers, Jr. tames the Old West with a rope and a grin in this breezy adventure directed by Oscar® winner Michael Curtiz (Casablanca, 1943) and costarring Nancy Olson, Lon Chaney, Jr. and Merv Griffin in a rare screen appearance. Wandering across the New Mexico territory, law student Tom Brewster (Rogers, Jr.) mails his final exam from Bluerock, a corrupt town whose sheriff was recently killed. So when the stagecoach is robbed and the letters stolen, Tom is offered the lawman’s position when it’s learned he won’t carry a gun. Read More »

• Portrait of François Truffaut
This excerpt from Serge Leroy’s 1961 documentary François Truffaut shows the newly celebrated filmmaker discussing his influences and beginnings along with Les Mistons and The 400 Blows.

from the Criterion DVD

Portrait of François Truffaut is a a twenty-five minute excerpt from a 1961 documentary by Serge Leroy, covering the director’s early years. Truffaut does plenty of talking about the creative choices and influences that went into his first films, while fidgeting restlessly in a chair before the camera, with overlong clips from his first few films mixed in.

from DVDBreakdown.comRead More »

Quote:
Well, what would you do? You’d never go along with this, right? You’re too smart. Me, too. “Compliance” encourages us to feel superior to the employees of a fast-food chicken chain in Ohio, and so we do: Audiences are said to be outraged at what the characters do, and San Francisco-based critic Omar Moore went back to more screenings to confirm that there were walk-outs.

In the case of “Compliance,” the walk-outs aren’t because it’s a bad movie, but because it’s all too effective at exposing the human tendency to cave in to authority. As the film opens, Sandra (Ann Dowd), the restaurant’s manager, is already feeling guilty. An employee left a freezer open and $15,000 in food was spoiled. Almost as bad, somebody didn’t order more pickles and bacon, and the district supervisor is scheduled to make an inspection visit. For Sandra, this is a perfect storm.Read More »

Synopsis:
Stephen Fermoyle has grown up in Boston at the turn of the twentieth century knowing that his destiny lies with the Catholic priesthood. Finally finishing his studies in Rome, he returns to America full of certitude and ambition to one day join the College of Cardinals. But his road to that office is a long one, paved with crises. In Boston, he must decide whether to save the life of his sister or her unborn child, conceived out of wedlock. In Austria, he confronts the question of whether to remain with the priesthood or abandon his oath so that he can be with the woman he loves. In Georgia, he contends with Rome’s indifference in the face of racial bigotry. And in Austria, he finds himself personally involved in the church’s dealings with the Third Reich.Read More »

Brecht said drama should always be performed with the house lights up so that that the spectator never forgot he was watching a play. Rappaport wants to remind us how artificial realism is, and how unreal our lives are. In this house of mirrors of one-size-fits-all, wash-and-wear identities, where is “reality”? In this echo-chamber of recycled one-liners, where is truth? What would it mean to escape from these permanent-press, ready-to-wear straight jackets? What would be left of language, thought, and emotion if we freed ourselves from the systems that we claim limit us? Life may be an elaborately coded charade, but what would expression be without the codes? We’d be invisible men if we took off our imaginative leisure suits. Rappaport takes his place alongside Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville, as an all-American explorer of the unreality of reality. It’s fitting that avant-garde theater pioneer Charles Ludlum is featured in one of the leads. —people.bu.edu/rcarneyRead More »

Filmed to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the 1917 Russian revolution, End of St. Petersburg was the second feature-length effort of director V. I. Pudovkin. Utilizing many of the montage techniques popularized by his contemporary Sergei Eisenstein, Pudovkin details the fall of St. Petersburg into the hands of the Bolsheviks during the revolution. Unlike Eisenstein, Pudovkin concentrates on individuals rather than groups (his protagonist is a politically awakened peasant played by Ivan Chuvelyov) humanizing what might otherwise have been a prosaic historical piece. The mob scenes, though obviously staged for ultimate dramatic impact, are so persuasive that they have frequently been excerpted for documentaries about the Russian Revolution, and accepted by some impressionable viewers as the real thing. Filmed just after his 1926 masterwork Mother, The End of St. Petersburg was followed by the equally brilliant Storm Over Asia.
— allmovie.comRead More »

It’s just another normal Saturday in Ukraine but Valery Kabysh, a young party official, sees panic on the faces of those in charge of the Chernobyl power station where a reactor tower has exploded. As he tries to rally together the woman he loves and his friends he finds all his attempts to get out of town are thwarted by the roots that have attached each and everyone of them to the place they live and work. All the while deadly plumes of radioactive smoke are silently rising up into the atmosphere.

3 Wins, 9 NominationsRead More »

Venice Film Festival wrote:
The film was made upon the invitation of the Serralves Foundation in Porto for the celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Foundation and the 10th anniversary of its Museum. A reflection on the Painéis de São Vicente de Fora, a 16th-century masterpiece attributed to Nuno Gonçalves.Read More »