Longtime Koreeda cinematographer (Nobody Knows, After Life) Yutaka Yamazaki’s first directorial effort, Torso, plows some similar ground to Koreeda’s Air Doll, but to much different effect. Torso covers the relationship between two half-sisters. The older one, Hiroko (Makiko Watanabe) is an uptight, disengaged urban survivor, whose only relationship is with an inflatable male torso. Her secret life of bathing, frolicking and having sex with this headless, armless and legless prosthetic is rudely interrupted when her half-sister, Mina (Sakura Ando) – all extroverted enthusiasm and blabber – appears at her doorstep running from her abusive boyfriend, the one person, or rather body, that never physically appears in the film. The torso and continuing variations of objectified bodies – perfume bottles, pillows, a dress-making mannequin and a gravure idol – becomes the underlying leitmotif of this sensitively rendered portrait of how individuals come to terms with their issues and problems. The “strange” sexuality of blow-up doll attraction is rendered somewhat positively. Watanabe and Ando are perfectly cast and directed with a strained chemistry that at once binds and separates them.Read More »

IMDB Review:
Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi is a film with no actors, no storyline, and no dialogue. The only things we see during the experimental documentary’s 87 minutes are natural landscapes, images of cities, and real people going about their regular lives. Yet from the very beginning, when we see the title of the film appear in blood-red characters and hear the voice of a bass soloist chanting the title like an incantation, it is difficult not to be swept away in captivation.Read More »

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Victoria, a young woman from Madrid, meets four local Berliners outside a nightclub. Sonne and his friends promise to show her a good time and the real side of the city. But these lads have gotten themselves into hot water: they owe someone a dangerous favor that requires repaying that evening. As Victoria’s flirtation with Sonne deepens into something more, he convinces her to come along for the ride. And later, when things become more ominous and possibly lethally dangerous for Sonne, she insists on coming along. As the night takes on an ever more menacing character, what started out as a good time, quickly spirals out of control. As dawn approaches, Victoria and Sonne address the inevitable: it’s all or nothing and they abandon themselves to a heart-stopping race into the depths of hell.Read More »

“In Recife, Dr. Paulo is an important lawyer that has a daughter, Heloísa, with his paramour and living in the country. A few days before traveling to Europe, Dr. Paulo asks to a close friend to bring Heloísa to Recife. Meanwhile, his bohemian and irresponsible son Helvécio meets Heloísa, and without knowing that she is his sister, he tries to rape her, and she kills him. Heloísa is arrested and goes to trial without any evidence to prove that she self-defended her honor” Written by Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil ( IMDB)
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In a small Pacific village, a widowed fisherman marries a girl young enough to be his daughter. Complications ensue when the new wife falls in love with her husband’s son.

Creaky but interesting melodrama powered by Walter Huston’s performance as a brute and a dynamite action ending. Although Wyler’s direction is not as sure as it would be later, it is interesting to note that, for the most accomplished studio director of all time, a man said to operate without a style of his own, a lot of images that show up in his later films (particularly WUTHERING HEIGHTS and THE LITTLE FOXES) also show up here.Read More »

In “Oriane,” the past is like a series of boxes, all different sizes and shapes, that the filmmaker beckons us to open. And in each is a memory, a treasured object, a wound.

The movie is by Fina Torres, a Venezuelan-born filmmaker making her debut as a director, and it has the texture of a personal tale. The character whose experiences are recalled here is a Frenchwoman in her thirties named Marie (Daniela Silverio) who learns that she has inherited the remote Venezuelan family estate that belonged to her recently dead aunt Oriane.Read More »

Plot: Another silent comedy with Billy aka Charley and very young Oliver Hardy. Rare movie!Read More »

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During the opening credits of Barbet Schroeder’s fable La Vallée, the camera swoops over a mysterious mountain range dotted with trees. The landscape glows with an eerie greenish tinge. Most of the view is obscured by thick clouds. Meanwhile, the original musical score by Pink Floyd sets an ominous tone, and a voiceover narrator tells the myth of a valley hidden by veils of mist. Later in the film we learn that the mountain range is one of the last uncharted landmasses in the world. Even on maps, large portions of the mountains are left white. Although the mountains have been explored, none of the explorers who made it to the top of the range and found the valley have returned. Not only is the journey treacherous, but local mythology claims that once the explorers find the valley they never want to leave. For the valley is paradise, and to leave paradise would bring down a curse on their souls.Read More »

Criterion Synopsis
Legendary French star Gérard Philipe swashbuckled his way into film history as the peasant soldier Fanfan in Christian-Jaque’s devil-may-care romantic action-comedy. In eighteenth-century France, Fanfan joins King Louis XV’s army to avoid a forced marriage to a local lass and gets himself into close scrapes and tight squeezes with Gina Lollobrigida’s impostor fortune-teller, Adeline, on his way to fighting in the Seven Years’ War. Filled to the brim with dazzling stunts and randy innuendo, Fanfan la Tulipe, which won the best director prize at Cannes and was a smash hit upon its initial release, remains one of France’s all-time most beloved films.Read More »