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The film was originally to have starred Gene Kelly, but Kelly was injured just prior to production and Astaire, who had announced his retirement from film, was coaxed back to replace him. (Astaire would “retire” several more times over the next decade, but he would also go on to make a number of additional classic musicals in between retirements.) This film marked the major MGM debut of tap-dancer Ann Miller (who had previously been under contract to RKO), replacing Cyd Charisse, who also had to bow out of the production.Read More »

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The Georgian-born filmmaker Michail Kalatozov (19031973) is best remembered for directing some of the most innovative and successful Soviet films of the 1950s and 1960s. This DVD presents digitally restored versions of two of his lesser-known, early works, which were highly controversial in their time but now rank among the finest achievements in Soviet silent cinema. Salt for Svanetia is an austere depiction of peasant life in the inhospitable terrain of the Caucasus Mountains. Nail in the Boot, a biting parable of wartime irresponsibility, chillingly prefigures the later Stalinist purge trials. Günter Buchwald’s and Stephen Horne’s prize-winning scores and the experimental accompaniment by Masha Khotimshi underline the poetic and expressive visual style of these exceptional masterpieces.Read More »

A handful of strangers hoping to find freedom discover it is no easy quarry in this metaphoric drama. Four people stand near the shore of a seaside community and board a small boat hoping to sail away; they are soon attacked by border guards, and one of them does not survive. The three remaining sailors — two men (Axel Neuman and Valentinas Masalskis) and a woman (Fatima Ennafloui) — wash up on the beach of an island strewn with rocks. None of them speak the same language, and they struggle to make their way on the unforgiving coastline, often at odds with each other. They find they are not alone on the island — an Arab settlement and a cadre of soldiers are already living there; the military men attack them, and the Arabs refuse to come to their aid. Freedom was shown in competition at the 2000 Venice Film Festival. (by Mark Deming,)

Runaway drug dealers and a lost girl travel through a desert and along the coast. This journey reveals the complicated relationships between people, their striving for freedom to be lonely.
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Lithuanian Film Center Home PageRead More »

Synopsis
The conflict in question is World War II; even though hostilities have all but ceased, the Germans and the French are not precisely reconciled. German soldier Richard Bohringer, absent without leave, is befriended by a couple of pre-teen boys. Despite the fact that they seem to have found a lasting peace, the adult world doesn’t see things the boys’ way…Read More »

From PT’s website:
The target of Tabula Rasa is the heart of cinema. Voyeuristic desire as the pre-condition for all cinema pleasure is at stake here. What Christian Metz and Jacques Lacan have established in theory is rendered as film in Tabula Rasa. At the beginning we can recognize only shadows from which the picture of a woman undressing herself hesitantly emerges. But exactly at the point when one believes one can make out what it is, the camera is located in front of the object. Tabula Rasa takes distance, the fundamental principle of voyeurism, in so far literally, as it shows us the object of desire but continually removes it from our gaze.Read More »

Sex and Film: The Erotic in British, American and World Cinema is a frank, comprehensive and insightful analysis of the cinema’s long love affair with the erotic – and how society is reflected through the many and bitter censorship battles that have accompanied all attempts by filmmakers to broaden the limits of what is acceptable. Barry Forshaw’s lively and scholarly study moves from the sexual abandon of the silent era and the 1930s through the enforced innocence resulting from the restrictive Hays Code (and the ingenious attempts by filmmakers to circumvent censorship) and the demolition of taboos by arthouse directors such as Ingmar Bergman in the 1950s and 1960s. The book highlights all the key moments in this incendiary area, including the shocking exploitation and pornographic movies of the 1970s, while a discussion of the graphic and explicit imagery of today’s mainstream cinema takes the book up to the present – and beyond.Read More »

Summary:
“Country boy Shuisheng (Wang Xiaoxiao) is brought to 1930s Shanghai by his uncle who wants the boy to become a member of the powerful gang ruled by manipulative Tang (Li Baotian). In fact, Shuisheng will serve Tang’s capricious mistress Bijou (Gong Li), a nightclub singer whom the boss proclaimed “the Queen of Shanghai.” When the boy’s uncle and the gang’s several other members die during a rival gang’s unsuccessful attempt on Tang’s life, the latter retreats to a remote small island, taking both Bijou and Shuisheng with him and thinking of revenge.Read More »

The movie that is BANNED in India.
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When a film is “banned” by the Censor Board of Film Certification, you know you are onto something. Well, that is exactly the case with Raj Amit Kumar’s film Unfreedom.

Homosexuality.

Islam.

Thinking outside of convention.

Unfreedom breaks all the “rules”.

The film follows two different lives, the storyline pivoting on a female same-sex relationship and the dangers of religious extremism.Read More »

Synopsis:
Eight people that cannot be more different meet in a bar. For one night they escape their everyday life which is paralysed of rituals and find themselves in a journey to their world of thoughts, their quintessential lust. Oppressed wishes, sexual fantasies and fears come to the surface and forgotten experiences are revealed. The evening takes its course.

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A film about people, their wishes, fears, hopes and longings.
A visually stunning glance behind the facades of daily routine…
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