In the bleak days of 1983, the Crimson Permanent Assurance, an accountancy staffed by elderly workers much like a slave ship, has been taken over by efficiency-minded corporate types. When they sack an employee, there’s an uprising, and the building is unleashed from its moorings to sail across the (dry) ocean and take on the financial centers of the world, starting with an all-out attack on the large skyscraper housing The Very Big Corporation of America, complete with filing-cabinet cannons, ceiling-fan broadswords, and paper-spindle short-swords.Read More »

The horseless Marfa Lapkina, together with the local agronomist and other poor peasants, organizes a dairy farm in the village. However, local kulaks are actively resisting the project and any success it could provide. Old poor people also resists, not understanding the meaning of camaraderie and what their unification could bring to them…Read More »

Asian warriors take a group of Western women hostage and bring them to their all-female village, leading to a culture clash.

Women Make Movies wrote:

Ulrike Ottinger’s epic adventure traces a fantastic encounter between two different worlds. Seven western women travelers meet aboard the sumptuous, meticulously reconstructed Trans-Siberian Express, a rolling museum of European culture. Lady Windemere, an elegant ethnographer played by the incomparable Delphine Seyrig in her last screen role, regales a young companion with Mongol myths and lore while other passengers-a prim tourist (Irm Hermann), a brash Broadway chanteuse and an all-girl klezmer trio-revel in campy dining car cabaret. Suddenly ambushed by a band of Mongol horsewomen, the company is abducted to the plains of Inner Mongolia and embark on a fantastic camel ride across the magnificent countryside. Breathtaking vistas, the lavish costumes of Princess Ulun Iga and her retinue, and the rituals of Mongol life are stunningly rendered by Ottinger’s cinematography. Dubbed a female Lawrence of Arabia and just as sweepingly romantic, JOHANNA D’ARC OF MONGOLIA is a grandly entertaining, unforgettable journey.Read More »

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Foul-mouthed, fast-talking and very funny, this is Parker’s best to date. It’s an intentionally ‘small’ movie that treats a familiar subject (kids forming a rock band) with a deft intimacy. But as the young hopefuls from Dublin’s working-class Northside go through the round of auditions, rehearsals and gigs, it becomes clear that the film is big in heart. For Parker and his excellent, mostly non-professional cast are indeed committed to characters, milieu and music: classics from Otis, Wilson Pickett, Aretha et al. For one thing, the script precisely captures both the witty banter and the modest dreams of the streetwise kids. For another, Parker never over-emphasises the unemployment and poverty, nor does he glamorise the band. The result is a gritty, naturalistic comedy blessed with a wry, affectionate eye for the absurdities of the band’s various rivalries and ambitions; and the songs are matchless.Read More »

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Two closely related episodes. Youths make problems for two local orchestras about to compete nationally, and in a talent competition a young girl gets stage fright, while another lies to her boss to compete.Read More »

Set in the bleak aftermath and devastation of the World War I, a recently demobbed soldier, Timosh, returns to his hometown Kiev, after having survived a train wreck. His arrival coincides with a national celebration of Ukrainian freedom, but the festivities are not to last as a disenchanted.

In Arsenal, Alexander Dovzhenko, perhaps the most radical of the Soviet directors of the silent period, altered the already extended conventions of cinematic structure to a degree greater than had even the innovative Sergei Eisenstein in his bold October. The effect of this tinkering with the more or less accepted proprieties of motion picture construction produced a work that is actually less a film than it is a highly symbolic visual poem. For example, in a more linearly structured piece like October, the metaphors, allusions, and analogies that arise through the construction of the various montages replace rather than comment on essential actions within the film. In Arsenal, however, the symbolism is so purposely esoteric, with seemingly deliberate barriers established to block the viewer’s perception, that the relationship of individual symbols or sequences to the various actions of the film is not immediately clear.Read More »

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Is there a more extraordinary auteur career than that of Bruno Dumont? Having started as one of Europe’s foremost purveyors of extreme cinema and extreme seriousness, he made a startling move to wacky broad comedy, and is handling it as if to the manner born. Now he gives us Ma Loute, or Slack Bay, a macabre pastoral entertainment by the seaside from the belle époque: it’s an old-fashioned provincial comedy with something of Clochemerle, a world in which everyone seems to have drunk their bodyweight in absinthe. There’s also the surreal meta-strangeness of Ken Russell’s version of The Boyfriend.Read More »

The film explores the global power and impact of the music of John Coltrane and reveals the passions, experiences and forces that shaped his life and revolutionary sounds.

filmthreat wrote:

As inspiring as the music of Coltrane itself, Chasing Trane: The John Coltrane Documentary unfolds the life of the galactic saxophonist whose soulful approach to music incessantly spread light, peace, and love into the world.

Coltrane put his life in music, resorting to a unique timbre, accurate technique, and an unshakeable spirituality, delivering quintessential records that still sound modern and bold today. I believe that every true jazz fan was touched in a way or another by the art of this jazz giant whose musical phases encompass bebop, cool jazz, post-bop, and spiritual avant-garde jazz and modal music.Read More »

The Damned has often been regarded as the first of Visconti’s films described as “The German Trilogy”, followed by Death in Venice (1971) and Ludwig (1973). Henry Bacon (1998) specifically categorizes these films together under a chapter “Visconti & Germany”. Visconti’s earlier films had analyzed Italian society during the Risorgimento and postwar periods. Peter Bondanella’s Italian Cinema (2002) depicts the trilogy as a move to take a broader view of European politics and culture. Stylistically, “They emphasize lavish sets and costumes, sensuous lighting, painstakingly slow camerawork, and a penchant for imagery reflecting subjective states or symbolic values,” comments Bondanella.Read More »