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Independence is a crucial part of the legend of John Cassavetes, the original Method actor turned DIY filmmaker. For that reason his early forays into studio directing — he made 1961’s “Too Late Blues” for Paramount and 1963’s Stanley Kramer-produced “A Child Is Waiting” for United Artists — are usually thought of as footnotes at best, or compromised failures at worst (a view that has been ascribed to Cassavetes himself).

But even in these minor works, the Cassavetes touch — the delicate way of handling emotional messiness, the tough but ultimately generous view of human behavior — is unmistakable. The rarely seen “Too Late Blues,” new to DVD from Olive Films, is an especially resonant work, a parable about the price of artistic independence and the conflicts of ego and idealism — in other words, something like a confessional manifesto from the emerging director, 31 when he made it.Read More »

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The hero of Alfonso Cuarón’s “Sólo Con Tu Pareja” is Tomás Tomás (Daniel Giménez Cacho), a young man living alone in a roomy Mexico City apartment with a tedious job writing advertising copy and a hyperactive romantic life. Apparently and perhaps not quite plausibly irresistible to women, he is also unable to resist them, which is believable enough, since the women in this movie favor garter belts, half-slips and other kinds of retro-sexy lingerie, which they seem happy to display, or to remove, in Tomás’s presence.Read More »

My beloved
Will you sleep foreverRead More »

Young, naive and innocent, Pierre (Manuel Blanc) has dreams of becoming an actor. He is a good-looking and personable boy, and he has just moved to the city to see if he can’t accomplish his dreams. He gets a job as an orderly at a hospital and is further supported by an older woman (Helene Vincent), a nurse he has met there, in return for his sexual favors. However, in his acting class, he quickly discovers that he is not overflowing with talent, and his dream of becoming an actor grows dim. Instead, despite the advice of a knowledgeable and worldly older gay man (Philippe Noiret), he becomes a sex worker. It has long been a staple of the movies that certain hustlers and prostitutes maintain a distinction between their work and their lives by not kissing their clients, hence the title of this film, J’embrasse Pas. He grows to love the seedy, degraded lifestyle, and seems to be adapting well to his new profession until he has the poor judgement to fall in love with a high-class prostitute (Emmanuelle Béart) and earns the antagonism of her pimp. allmovieRead More »

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This roller coaster ride depicting four days in the life of a group of speed freaks has a real gay feel to it. Blondie diva Deborah Harry plays a nosy man-hating, butch-dyke neighbor who steals the girl, Eric Roberts dives right into the role an over-the-top totally queenie drug dealer adorned on both sides by hunky Abercrombie and Fitch-type models. Openly gay Alexis Arquette butches it up as a drug-addicted cop with some wild sunglasses. A heavily tatooed ex-Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford (who it is rumored was booted out of the band for coming out) makes an appearance as the manager of an adult video arcade. And sexy John Leguizamo spends most of the film either half dressed or undressed as he performs a hilarious extended masturbation scene wearing only a sock over his dick. All this, a great story and a terrific soundtrack (and cameo) from ex-Smashing Pumpkin Billy Corgan.Read More »

A well meaning math teacher finds herself trumped by a post-fact America.Read More »

Ponmani comes from the highest caste in Tamil society, but her family has fallen on hard times and can’t even pay what they owe on her married eldest sister’s dowry, let alone find dowries for her and her middle sister. Her father sits idly by, reflecting on past glories, while her brother works to pay the money owed and preserve the family honor. When she takes matters into her own hands and elopes with a boy from the lower fisherman caste, the family honor takes a deathblow. The difficulty of life for a Tamil woman whatever her caste, religion or marital status is given a feminist analysis. This black and white film from Sri Lanka’s rebel Sinhalese auteur, Dharmasena Pathiraja, shows the beauty of Jaffna, an ancient city of temples, churches and beaches, and gives us an idea of the forces behind the civil war that broke out later. Festivals: Singapore International Film Festival 2003.Read More »

Stockholm, 1914. Having recently escaped Austria, Anna, an impetuous cosmopolitian young photographer, decides to open her own studio in an attic tucked away above the city. When her girlfriend Linnea comes to the city looking for a job, Anna employs the bashful girlish-woman as her partner. Together they fend for themsleves by: posing nude and stealing, as Anna teaches Linnea to relinquish inihibitions. Out of nowhere, Willy, a thin gypsy circus entertainer appears. He and Anna resume a love affair much to Linnea’s dismay. Later, Linnea later learns that Willy helped Anna leave Halling, a sadistic man who kept her in bondage for years. One day Willy suggests the they all leave for America; but Anna resists violently and in a heated argument accidently kills Willy. Now the women struggle to deal with the consequences of Willy’s death.Read More »

This 20 minute experimental short is generally considered to be the start of a new visual style in Hungarian filmmaking. Often called a “film poem” or a “film symphonie”, Huszárik’s masterpiece begins with wild horses, and ends in the slaughterhouse. The film is thought to be an allegory to the human fate.Read More »