Quote:
Amedeo (E. Jannacci), a mild officer on leave, comes to Rome from a town in the North to speak eye to eye with the Pope, “also in his interest.” He tries unsuccessfully for months until one night, sick with pneumonia, dies in front of a papal building.
Kafka (The Castle) is there, but somewhat far.
MorandiniRead More »

Andrew’s life has hit rock bottom. After being fired from his job and discovering that his girlfriend is having an affair, he hits the streets looking for work only to discover a non-stop series of sexual delights waiting for him at every turn.

Quote:
When a country boy arrives in the Big City with nothing but starry eyes and dreams of making a success of himself, he finds that his best asset might just be the one between his legs.
Jon Martin stars as the naive young man, a guy whose sexual prowess ends up getting him anything he wants out of life. His job search initially lands him in the back of a restaurant, washing dishes even as the saucy siren who runs the joint is dabbling in lesbian hi jinx right there behind the counter!
Jon leaves that job soon enough, this time to try his luck at selling encyclopedias. Well, he doesn’t move many volumes, but he does end up in the clinch with a buxom beauty who prefers him to his reference books.
In the end, Jon finds himself working as an account executive for a publishing company — another job that he got thanks to some tireless trysting with just the right woman.Read More »

Synopsis:
The story concerns the romance between Carmela and Antonio. Faced with the hostility of their parents, they symbolically shed themselves of all responsibilities to others in a climactic act of stark-naked bravado.Read More »

A young woman, Janice, is living with her restrictive and conservative parents, who lead a dull working-class life, and consider their daughter to be “misbehaving” whenever she’s trying to find her own way in life. When she becomes pregnant, they force her into abortion, and hypocritically blame her for “upsetting them” when she is unable cope with the emotional and mental effect this has on her. The film is depressing and excruciatingly painful and hard to watch, as Janice is subjected to brain-washing and reproach by her parents and shockingly self-righteous and ignorant doctors (could this have been only 25 years ago???). A masterpiece, a stark and painful portrait of a hypocritical society. Read More »

Quote:
The opening shots of Satyajit Ray’s Charulata bypass melodrama for the feel of a fairy tale, with bored housewife Charu (Madhabi Mukherjee) flitting about her spacious Victorian home like Rapunzel amusing herself in her tower. Even shots that stay still for less than a second frame Charu behind bars, be it bedposts or the wooden blinds she jerks open in order to peer at the bustling city life below. Never again does the camera move as swiftly nor as giddily as it does when Charu, armed with a pair of binoculars, hustles along each window to follow the movement of a man she finds interesting. The scene ends as quickly as it came to life, nothing more than a fleeting distraction from the tedium of her sheltered existence.Read More »

Quote:
The world of Claire Denis’s Bastards is one of nightmarish inversion, where compassion has no place and connection only breeds despair. Structured around the fracturing of two family units, one irreparably shattered, one holding firm despite intense pressure, it imagines life as a steady succession of denials, duty waging a futile struggle against desire. In this reckoning every image grows twisted, the seductive mirage of a naked woman in high heels soon tarnished by the blood trickling down her legs. Conditioning the audience to find dread in every seemingly innocent gesture, the film turns even the simplest touch between family members into something tinged with menace.Read More »

Quote:
Investment banker HP has allegedly ridden out the crash of the stock exchange. One evening, on a barbecue event with his banker friends and their wives, HP’s Danish au pair girl threatens to blow the whistle on her love affair with HP’s married boss. HP wants to please everybody but what was set out to be a gathering amongst friends spins out of control into a night of blackmail and intrigue. The next morning, he has lost everything: his house, his wife, his friends, and his job…Read More »

Margot, who lives in a comfortable middle class apartment, fears that she is losing her mind after having had her second child. Her husband Kurt, who is busy studying for an exam, does not understand her situation. Her mother-in-law and sister-in-law Lore are openly hostile to her. She resorts to valium and drink, and looks for sympathy, but to no avail.Read More »

Quote:
It perhaps comes as no surprise, given Carl Theodor Dreyer’s lifelong, idealized melancholy over his own unresolved parentage, that the scenario selected for his first film, The President would involve three generations of children conceived out of wedlock, and thematically crystallize on the legacy of their unreconciled paternity in the resolution of their own disparate lives. For Dreyer, this expurgation of such deep-seated trauma was not only manifested in the naïve idea of restoring the virtue and honor of a “fallen” woman (an archetypal surrogate for his own idealized, unwed, biological mother) through transcendence, but also in confronting the innate cruelty of the very institutions that socially (and inequitably) stigmatized such human transgressions through codified notions of morality and class division. Read More »