Broadcast:
BBC1 on 13th October 1992

Summary:

Documentary profile of film director Ridley Scott. The programme traces Scott’s career from West Hartlepool Art School to the Royal College of Art to the BBC, where he worked as a designer and later director on programmes such as SOFTLY SOFTLY and ADAM ADAMANT LIVES! (extract shown). He then moved into advertising, his most celebrated work being the Hovis advertisements – works of his shown include films for Bird’s Eye Fish Fingers “Stowaway” (1969), Hovis “Bike Ride” and Apple Computers “1984” (1983). His brother Tony Scott also talks about his work in commercials, and how he took over the direction of the Hovis adverts when Ridley moved into features. After such work and the BFI-produced BOY AND BICYCLE (1965) made with his brother Tony (extracts shown), he then moved into feature film direction: extracts shown from THE DUELLISTS (1977), ALIEN (1979), BLADE RUNNER (1982), SOMEONE TO WATCH OVER ME (1987), BLACK RAIN (1989), THELMA & LOUISE (1991) and his most recent film, shown in production, 1492: CONQUEST OF PARADISE (1992). Ridley Scott’s direction of the film LEGEND (1985) is not considered in the programme. Various interviewees comment on his working methods, his flashes of temper, and his mastery of screen visuals. The contributors to the programme include Susan Sarandon, Sigourney Weaver, Michael Douglas, David Puttnam, Gerard Depardieu, Iain Smith, Stephen Crowther (a teacher from West Hartlepool Art School), Tony Scott, ad executive Barry Day, Keith Carradine, sons Jake and Luke Scott, H.R. Giger, Mimi Rogers, Andy Garcia, Callie Khouri, Geena Davis and BBC set designer Jeffrey Kirkland. Read More »

Quote:
Three emotionally abused people from the fringes of society get locked in a convoluted love triangle. Yuu, a Catholic boy searching for true love ends up taking erotic photographs of women in public until he discovers Yoko, whom he sees as his Virgin Mary. Yoko, an antifamily, misandristic girl finds that her foster mother will be marrying Yuu’s father. Koike, an “original sinner”, coordinates a plan to convert Yuu’s family to her cult. Under her careful direction, their lives come crashing together in one fateful street fight.Read More »

An undercover agent is sent to infiltrate bootleggers in the Florida Everglades, but winds up lost in the swamps and stuck in a decrepit hotel with a few of peculiar inhabitants. What starts off like a police actioner quickly morphs into an unholy fairy tale of Southern Gothic melodrama and horror.

“After a very limited release, the film vanished without a trace, leaving only its ad campaign to back up that it ever existed. In the early 2000s, through a twist of fate, a print was discovered. Now, fully digitally restored, it is presented to audiences for the first time in over 50 years.” —NWRRead More »

A nativity story reboot that gently skewers French cultural pretensions, it features newcomer Victor Ezenfis as a discontented Parisian teenager in search of a father, Mathieu Amalric and Fabrizio Rongione as his, respectively, callous and gentle alternative paternal options, and Natacha Régnier as his single mother.
The American-born expatriate filmmaker Eugène Green exists in his own special artistic orbit. All Green’s films share a formal rigor and an increasingly refined modulation between the playfully comic, the urgently human, and the transcendent, and they are each as exquisitely balanced as the baroque music and architecture that he cherishes.
Eugène Green drops biblical motifs – Abraham and Isaac, Mary and Joseph – into this genuinely contemporary setting as if it were the most natural thing in the world, augmenting them with nods to crime films, Italian Baroque music, a Doisneau photograph, three 17th century paintings and an artificial way of speaking that is anything but current.
The characters are positioned within the visual compositions and look directly into the camera, their diction flawless. Whatever needs saying – and that’s a lot – they recite impassively, in declamatory fashion. Along the way, there are jabs at the literature milieu and trendy yuppies.
A film where divine seriousness rubs against bizarre comedy, where theology meets caricature, an intriguing film, anachronistic and innovative in equal measure.Read More »

Following the suicide of his beloved brother and deaths of even the most distant acquaintances, Abel Rosenberg attempts to discover the truth while facing depression, alcoholism, and anti-semitism.

Vincent Canby wrote:

BERLIN, NOV. 3-11, is a city without sunlight. Mostly it rains. It snows occasionally but it’s the kind of snow that is already gray by the time it reaches the cobblestones. Everything is damp, chilled. No winter coats anywhere. People cling to one another for warmth, but there is none. In effect, life is over in Ingmar Bergman’s new film, “The Serpent’s Egg.” What we witness are involuntary twitches, the glazing of eyeballs—the onset of rigor mortis.Read More »

Summary from wikipedia:
Quote:
Amok is a 1934 French film, directed by Fyodor Otsep. The director was nominated for the Mussolini Cup at the 1934 Venice International Film Festival. The movie centers on a physician, Dr. Holk, in a small Dutch colony in the tropics. A strange illness, known as Amok, is turning innocent people into madmen. When a young woman, Hèlène, comes to him asking for an abortion so that her returning husband will not know she has been unfaithful, he refuses. Hélène seeks help elsewhere, leading Dr. Holk to try to find and save her before it’s too late.Read More »

While trying to raise money to prevent his car from being repossessed, George is attracted to Lola, a Frenchwoman who works in a “model shop” (an establishment which rents out beautiful pin-up models to photographers). George spends his last twelve dollars to photograph her, and discovers that she is as unhappy as he.Read More »

Quote:
Because of the stupid life in a pâté-factory, former singer Laura falls in love with a colleague, a much younger boy and boxer, and after a small performance, a reenactment of her singing character, she tries to reenter the national song contest.Read More »

A teenaged tomboy, tired of being bossed around by her strict guardian, impersonates a man so she can have more fun, but discovers that being the opposite sex isn’t as easy as she had hoped.

Quote:
I Don’t Want To Be A Man is like The Oyster Princess an early example of Ernst Lubitsch’s comic skills, and it also shares The Oyster Princess’ star, the irrepressible comedienne Ossi Oswalda, who in both films lends her name to the characters she plays. Here she plays a wild, rambunctious late teen barely under the control of her guardian/uncle and governess. (In reality it takes a while to work out that this middle-aged couple glaring disapprovingly out the window at Ossi’s mild antics outside are not her parents; they seemed rather coded as such.)Read More »