Plot
In Paris, a young woman, Louise Haines Pearson, visits her disturbed friend Nena who tells her that she has just written a book on the history of a little girl troubled by her senses, perhaps because of the tyranny of his mother and the absence of her father. Louise recognizes the difficulties of this little girl, being herself deeply affected by the indifference of her husband.Read More »
Although he has been limited to bit parts, actor Tony Longo is an axiom of American action cinema: the giant who is too softhearted for the job. Composed of three short movies, “Hey, Asshole!,” “Adam Kesher” and “You Fucking Dickhead!,” The Tony Longo Trilogy brings together all of the actor’s scenes in three of his most memorable films: “The Takeover” (Troy Cook, 1995), “Living in Peril” (Jack Ersgard, 1997) and “Mulholland Dr.” (David Lynch, 2001).
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Music, art and chaos in the wild West-Berlin of the 1980s. The walled-in city became the creative melting pot for sub- and pop-culture. Before the iron curtain fell, everything and anything seemed possible. B-MOVIE is a fast-paced collage of mostly unreleased film and TV footage from a frenzied but creative decade, starting with punk and ending with the Love Parade, in a city where the days are short and the nights are endless. Where it was not about long-term success, but about living for the moment – the here and now.Read More »
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“Network” will shake you up. Paddy Chayefsky’s absurdly plausible and outrageously provocative original script concerns media running amok. Faye Dunaway and William Holden, each in two of their finest performances, plus Peter Finch and Robert Duvall star in this superbly cast and handsomely produced Howard Gottfried production. Sidney Lumet’s direction is outstanding. The Metro picture, released by United Artists, is a potent commercial blend of artful tirade, visual excitement and sociological horror.
In terms of older films about the broadcast media, this is no soap opera film, like MGM’s long-ago “The Hucksters.” Nor is it low-key, intellectual drama like “A Face In the Crowd.” This is a bawdy, stops-out, no-holds-barred story of a TV network that will, quite literally, do anything to get an audience. The strangest thing about the film is that, while often preachy, hysterical, shrill and bizarre, it also makes a compelling statement from amidst its sound and fury. It’s a verbal and visual equivalent of a dozen top-40 radio stations blaring out at you in the same room. In short, it’s just mad.Read More »
Based on Italo Svevo’s great novel so admired by James Joyce, this atmospherically photographed film is set in old Trieste and centers on a middle-aged public official and his unrequited love for a flirtatious but unpossessable girl who blithely betrays him. The melancholy hero is played by Anthony Franciosa; Claudia Cardinale is the girl. The man’s sister (Betsy Blair) is a depressive also disappointed in love. Upon her death by her own hand our hero faces a life of continued solitude.
Bolognini’s misty evocation of perennial “tristezza” (sadness of spirit) and its equivalent in damp gloomy ambiance is the kind of thing he does so well. One only has to think of what he achieved in “La viaccia” and “Fatti di gente perbene”. This is one of his very best films and was only given a limited release in the U.S.A. under the title of “Careless”. Director of photography Armando Nannuzzi gave the “old postcard” look to the city.
Gerald A. DeLuca @VIMDbRead More »
Apache was based on Paul I. Wellman’s novel Broncho Apache, which in turn was inspired by a true story. Burt Lancaster plays Massai, a lieutenant of the great Apache warrior Geronimo (here depicted as an old man, played by Monte Blue). Though his tribe has signed surrender terms with the conquering whites, Massai refuses to do so. He escapes from a prison train and conducts a one-man war against the white intruders-and against some of his own people. Along the way, he claims Nalinle (Jean Peters), whom he previously regarded as a traitor to his cause, as his wife. John McIntire plays famed Indian scout Al Sieber, who-in this film, if not in real life-is sympathetic to the Indians’ plight and Massai’s single-purposed cause. The real-life counterpart to Massai was killed by Sieber’s minions after agreeing to call off the hostilies; United Artists objected to this, forcing producer/star Burt Lancaster to shoot an unconvincingly happy ending.
Hal Erickson, All Movie GuideRead More »
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With Unit 7, Alberto Rodriguez paid homage to his native Seville whilst producing a fine urban thriller. Now he does the same for rural Spain, moving an hour south to the marshlands of Andalucia. While 7 was explosive, Marshland is noirishly tense on different levels, its tight focus on character, its realism, it’s sense of place and its social critique adding up to a grippingly intense whole — and that’s not to mention it’s satisfyingly twisting plotline. Though puzzlingly it’s been overlooked by the Spanish Film Academy as the country’s foreign film nomination, Marshland merits international exposure as an example of both one of the year’s best Spanish-language films and of how to fold significance into genre.Read More »
A young Japanese film maker is in hospital in Tokyo. His estranged father tries to visit, but the son refuses to see him. So, as a gesture of reconciliation, the father decides to go to China to complete the filming of a Chinese opera, called “Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles,” which the son was working on but unable to finish.Read More »
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Switch is a faint-hearted sex comedy that doesn’t have the courage of its initially provocative convictions. Undemanding audiences will get a few laughs from the notion of a man parading around in Ellen Barkin’s body. Ladykiller Steve Brooks (Perry King) accepts an invitation for a hot tub frolic with three of his old girlfriends, only to be murdered by them for his innumerable emotional crimes against women over the years. Steve is given a chance to escape a fiery fate by returning to Earth and finding just one woman who genuinely likes him. Only catch is that he will henceforth inhabit the body of a woman, and that of an uncommonly sexy one.Read More »