Article: from ~ by James Steffen
Immanuel Rath is a stuffy, disciplinarian professor who is shocked to discover his students passing around a postcard of Lola-Lola, a singer at The Blue Angel cabaret. Hoping to catch his students there, Professor Rath visits the nightclub and witnesses Lola-Lola’s performance. Entranced by her dissolute charms, he gets drunk on champagne and spends the night with her. The ensuing scandal causes him to lose control of his students and he is terminated from his position. Returning to Lola, he agrees to marry her and joins the troupe. His humiliation at having to play a clown onstage is compounded by Lola’s attraction to the strongman Mazeppa. To make matters worse, the troupe returns to the professor’s hometown, forcing him to acknowledge how far he has fallen.Read More »
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Josef von Sternberg – Der blaue Engel aka The Blue Angel (1930)
1921-1930ClassicsDramaGermanyJosef von Sternberg -
Keith Maitland – Tower (2016)
2011-2020AnimationDocumentaryKeith MaitlandUSANearly fifty years ago, a gunman rode the elevator to the twenty-seventh floor of the University of Texas Tower and opened fire. TOWER, an animated and action-packed documentary, shares the untold story of that day – when the worst in one man brought out the best in so many others. Read More »
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Jodie Mack – Something Between Us (2016)
2011-2020ExperimentalJodie MackShort FilmUSAA choreographed motion study for twinkling trinkets: costume jewelry and natural wonders join forces to perform plastic pirouettes, dancing a luminous lament until the tide comes in.
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Best known for her single-frame animations centered on fabrics, weaving, and other craft-based materials, Mack has recently taken an interest in a more conventional photography, examining objects like reflective mobiles that have the capacity to instigate semi-psychedelic, prismatic light-play, but on the cheap. These are the optical toys of our time, the glinting doodads from Justice or Hot Topic that bring the hypnotic dazzle of reflective light into the mundane self-styled universe of the girls’ dorm room. (These shiny points of jagged illumination can provoke what Kenneth Anger believed to be epiphanic moments of communion with Lucifer, the God of Light.) Something Between Us plays with the cheap shine of costume jewelry, but does so in a broader, more environmental manner.Read More »
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Eric Pauwels – La Deuxième Nuit AKA The Second Night (2016)
2011-2020ArthouseBelgiumDocumentaryEric PauwelsOn the death of his mother, a filmmaker makes a film to see how much her disappearance has changed his vision of the world. It is an opportunity for him to look back over his relationship with her: a relationship that made him a free individual, as a man and as a filmmaker. The second night is the final part of a trilogy that began with Letter from a filmmaker to his daughter, which was followed by Dreaming films. The making of this ” Cabin Trilogy” is the fruit of fifteen years of work and reflection.Read More »
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Philippe Claudel – Une enfance AKA A Childhood (2015)
2011-2020DramaFrancePhilippe ClaudelQuote:
As summer drags by, 13-year-old Jimmy, forced by circumstance to become an adult too soon, runs up against the limits of his small hometown and his turbulent life, caught between a mother on the slide and a stepfather who keeps her down.Read More » -
Claude Lelouch – Partir, revenir AKA Going and Coming Back (1985)
1981-1990Claude LelouchDramaFranceQuote:
Salomé Lerner just finished writing an autobiograpy. She goes to a TV show called “Apostrophes”, hosted by French TV showman Bernard Pivot. Pivot then imagines a film that could be created from her gripping story. A film entirely made of music because after seeing the young pianist Erik Berchot, Salomé believes seeing her long lost brother, who was a musician as well. A brother she had lost along with her parents in 1943. However, the Lerners did in fact escape the gestapo and might have based themselves in Paris…Read More » -
Johan Renck – Downloading Nancy (2008)
2001-2010DramaJohan RenckUSAFilm is based on real events: link
By Kam Williams
News Blaze.com
If you were contemplating suicide, but couldn’t quite summon up the nerve to do yourself in, where would you turn for help? In the Internet Age, you might surf S&M chat rooms to find a sadist whose fetish corresponds with your masochistic tendencies.That’s precisely the approach taken by Nancy Stockwell (Maria Bello), a clinically-depressed housewife who’s fed up with her lot in life after being stuck in an unsatisfying marriage for 15 years. It’s not that her emotionally-estranged husband, Albert (Rufus Sewell), has exactly been abusive or anything, unless mere neglect counts. He’s just been very busy, between the demands of his job and working on his golf game.Read More »
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Rakhshan Banietemad – Nargess (1992)
Drama1991-2000IranRakhshan Banietemad

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A sharp-edged look at people who live outside the constraints of Islamic law. In her fourth feature, director Rakhshan Bani-Etemad tells the tragic story of a love triangle. Afagh, an aging thief who has lost her beauty, is on the verge of losing her young lover, Adel. When Adel meets the beautiful Nargess, he decides to go straight, but honest work does not come easily, and he decides to go back to the old life for one last job. “Bani-Etemad pushes the Iranian censorship code to the limit, managing to make her outsider characters believable and moving” (Deborah Young, Variety).Read More » -
Harun Farocki – White Christmas (1968)
1961-1970DocumentaryGermanyHarun FarockiPoliticsQuote:
One of the many films drawing a connection between Christmas and war. It is unclear whether the longing for a white Christmas is being taken seriously, or whether it is intended as a denunciation. In either event, America’s war in Vietnam is denounced.(Harun Farocki)Read More »







