Synopsis:
A single father makes his meager living holding up an advertising placard on a traffic island in the middle of a busy highway. His children wait out their days in supermarkets before they eat with their father and go to sleep in an abandoned building. As the father starts to come apart, a woman in the supermarket takes the children under her wing. There are real stray dogs to be fed in Tsai’s everyday apocalypse, but the title also refers to its principal characters, living the cruelest of existences on the ragged edges of the modern world.

Stray Dogs is many things at once: minimal in its narrative content and syntax, as visually powerful as it is emotionally overwhelming, and bracingly pure in both its anger and its compassion. One of the finest works of an extraordinary artist.Read More »

A 1966 short film written, shot, edited and directed by David Cronenberg.

Quote:
Cronenberg:
Transfer, my first film, was a surreal sketch for two people – a psychiatrist and his patient – at a table set for dinner in the middle of a field covered in snow. The psychiatrist has been followed by his obsessive former patient. The only relationship the patient has had which has meant anything to him has been with the psychiatrist. The patient complains that he has invented things to amuse and occasionally worry the psychiatrist but that he has remained unappreciative of his efforts.Read More »

This violent, gore-filled, effective horror tale by director Robert Gordon is about a totally wacko private zoo keeper, Michael Conrad (Michael Gough) whose literal worship of the animals he tends — especially the cat species — starkly contrasts with his cold-blooded disregard for human life. Conrad has a mute son Carl (Rod Lauren) with a simmering Oedipal hatred, and a wife who should have left him eons ago. Whenever Conrad gets miffed with anyone coming a little too close to his private affairs he simply feeds the hapless victim to the animals. It seems inevitable that if the animals do not get him, then the human species will. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, RoviRead More »

Based on the short stories of Curzio Malaparte, The Skin is Liliana Cavani s controversial look at the aftermath of the German occupation of Italy during WWII and the equally difficult results of life during the Allied liberation. Marcello Mastroianni stars as writer Malaparte, who chronicled the desperate measures taken by his countrymen in order to survive. Burt Lancaster co-stars as the liberating American General unable to understand the devastation around him.Read More »

SYNOPSIS:
A petty crook, in search of the proverbial pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, hopes to cash in by befriending the heir to a huge fortune.

Production notes:
This was Jodorowsky’s sixth feature-length film, and his first British film. Filming was carried out in Gdansk, Poland. He was frequently threatened by the producers not to change anything in the script, effectively restraining further artistic involvement from his behalf. Jodorowsky has since disowned the movie. It was released in cinemas in London (May 1990), Italy (Il Ladro dell’arcobaleno, 1990), France (Le voleur d’arc-en-ciel, Paris, 1994) and, after, Spain (El ladrón del Arco iris, Cine Doré, Madrid, 2011); but it was never released in American cinemas.This movie, along with his previous Tusk in 1980, mark his most impersonal work, set far apart from his earlier work. It was discussed along with his other films in the documentary La Constellation Jodorowsky (1994).Read More »

Alice White is the daughter of a shopkeeper in 1920’s London. Her boyfriend, Frank Webber is a Scotland Yard detective who seems more interested in police work than in her. Frank takes Alice out one night, but she has secretly arranged to meet another man. Later that night Alice agrees to go back to his flat to see his studio. The man has other ideas and as he tries to rape Alice, she defends herself and kills him with a bread knife. When the body is discovered, Frank is assigned to the case, he quickly determines that Alice is the killer, but so has someone else and blackmail is threatened.Read More »

Quote:
In this autobiographical feature, Frank Ripploh plays himself: a German elementary-school instructor who lives a double life in his beloved Berlin, socializing with his fellow teachers only when he has to, and venturing into a world of anonymous sex whenever he can. In-between bathroom encounters and trips with his colleagues to the bowling alley, Ripploh manages to forge a steady relationship with a handsome, sad-eyed theater manager named Bernd Broaderup. As Ripploh’s sexual ardor for Broaderup gives way to a wandering eye, and Broaderup begins pressuring Ripploh to give up the city and its many temptations, the couple’s relationship replays a scene that was occurring in urban areas across the world and was satirized in such cultural snapshots as the Larry Kramer novel Faggots. Ripploh, who wrote, directed, and starred in Taxi Zum Klo, which, unlike most German films at the time, received no state funding, saw the picture become an international art-house hit after it played at 1981’s New York and Berlin film festivals.Read More »

Synopsis:
The vision of Lisandro Alonso, the blinding photography of Kaurismäki’s regular cameraman and the use of actor/musician Viggo Mortensen combined to ensure a magic result. A Danish military engineer sets off in 19th-century Patagonia looking for his missing daughter. A mysterious masterpiece. Nominated for The Big Screen Award
The Argentinian Lisandro Alonso, with the poet Fabian Casas, wrote a story about ‘Jauja’, an earthly paradise sought in vain for centuries because everyone who looked for it got lost on the way. In this case, it’s about the Danish captain/fortune hunter Dinessen (Danish-born, reluctant Hollywood star Viggo Mortensen) who, at the end of the 19th century, joined the Argentine infantry with his 14-year-old daughter Inge. When she runs off with a young soldier, Dinessen endlessly roams the pampas of Patagonia on the trail of a very thin dog.Read More »

“Sorrow does not come merely from contemplating death, which forces us to look into Eternity, but also from life, which compels us to confront Time”, wrote Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyayev. Renowned Lithuanian documentarist Audrius Stonys took these words as a motto for his latest film, a meditative visual essay which portrays old people undertaking all kinds of activities, meditation and group laughter therapy. Without a single word of commentary, he creates from sophisticated, aesthetic images a compelling study of human corporeality which, in an ideal union with spiritual equilibrium, can sustain us with the pledge that old age doesn’t have to be a painful wait for the last breath.Read More »