There’s a real murder and a real mystery in Woody Allen’s Manhattan Murder Mystery, but these plot pegs are used mainly to allow Allen to explore modern urban relationships. Allen plays a book editor, married to Diane Keaton (who replaced Mia Farrow, for reasons which were well publicized at the time). Keaton is a free spirit, ever willing to try new experiences, but Allen is a wet blanket. When it becomes apparent that a neighbor has killed his wife, Keaton is eager to investigate the mystery, but Allen thinks her suspicions are nonsensical and doesn’t want to leave his apartment. Undaunted, Keaton finds another “Nick Charles” in the form of family-friend Alan Alda, who, along with his enthusiastic wife (Angelica Huston), joins in the investigation. Slightly jealous, Allen reluctantly agrees to go along on Keaton’s clue-hunting expedition–and it is he who discovers the corpse, who as it turned out was killed after Keaton started poking around the apartment building.
— Hal Erickson @ allmovie.comRead More »

Quote:
Two 14-year-olds experience the first pangs of romantic love in the midst of their last moments of childhood. Sensitively told, this film conveys a sense of life as it is lived among that age-group, and is unusual because it does not bear a heavy party stamp. This is the first feature film for director {$Dinara Asanova}, who was much-respected in the Soviet Union for making realistic films about young people. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie GuideRead More »

Review
Secvente(Sequences, reffering to film sequences) is Alexandru Tatos’ quintessential film and one of the stepping stones of Romanian cinematography. Sadly, although being a critics and directors favorite ever since it’s release, Secvente never managed to find a wide audience, mostly due to the limited distribution the film received during it’s initial run in the communist years. This huge injustice was disappointingly never corrected and unless word doesn’t spread over this uniquely original gem of Romanian Cinema, Secvente will most surely never reach the following it deserves.Read More »

Synopsis:
Love and Anger is a collection of five stories that are the handiwork of directors that have made names for themselves in decidedly different ways among the annals of foreign cinema. The heavy hitters of the time are all on board, including Bernardo Bertolucci (The Last Emperor, Partner), Marco Bellocchio (Devil in the Flesh), Carlo Lizzani (Requiescant), Pier Paolo Pasolini (Salo), and, a huge treat, the legendary Jean-Luc Godard (Band of Outsiders, Breathless). Most of these films are extremely surreal, but they all have political undertones. This actually works out quite well, as even if you aren’t familiar with the political climate in Italy and France during the 1960s, you can revel in these masters’ liberal use of inventive imagery, much of which never comes completely together in a standard narrative structure. The actors come from a pair of renowned theater groups: the Living Theater and Andy Warhol Factory, and include Julian Beck, who made his mark in Hollywood as the creepy preacher in Poltergeist II.Read More »

Quote:
Loosely based on the fifth volume of Proust’s monolithic À La recherche du temps perdu, La Captive is a dark study of obsessive love from Chantal Akerman, currently one of Belgian’s most highly rated film directors. The feel of the film is more a psychological thriller than a traditional romantic drama, with frequent references to Hitchcock’s Vertigo more than evident.
The most striking feature of the film is its austere cinematography. Most of the film is set at night or within darkened rooms (which no matter how large appear stiflingly claustrophobic), something which constantly emphasises the prisoner-gaoler relationship of the two young lovers. Add to that the restrained (yet effective) performances of the two lead actors and the result is a hauntingly existentialist work, a chilling black poem of a fairytale romance twisted and ultimately obliterated by perverse mental aberrations.Read More »

Story “White Nights” by Fyodor Dostoevsky shot by Ivan Pyryev. Petersburg 1840s. A Dreamer, living in a big city for a few years and all the time he is alone. But one summer in St. Petersburg’s White Nights on the Neva, he meets Nastya. Five nights walking around the city, young people talk about themselves. With all the passion and tenderness of its nature the dreamer falls in love with Nastya. The girl, has feelings of despair of former lover, Dreamer promises to marry her. Unfortunately, the happiness is short-lived … Nastya is regaining his old love, and Dreamer is alone again.

1960 – Certificate IV IFF Film Festival in London-60
1960 – Best Film of 1960 (with the films “The Ballad of a Soldier” and “Revenge”) by a decision of the British Film InstituteRead More »

A documentary showing both how the Beatles made music together, and how they split up. Hundreds of hours of raw footage was condensed into the final product. The rooftop performance ending the film remains a rock-n-roll archetype.

Extended information

Thursday 2 – Wednesday 15 (January 1969) Recording sessions for The Beatles “White” album had proven to the group that they had entered a tense and difficult period. As their natural motivating force, Paul could think of only one solution: to have them “get back” to what had united them best before inconceivable fame and fortune had clouded the issue – live performances.Read More »

Black Sheep Boy is the first of three short films by Michael Wallin on his Water Bearer Films DVD. All three films present images with voiceovers and are included. There are no extras.Read More »

SYNOPSIS
This sexy and funny story of a fortysomething guy who wants to fall in love with a woman, but shares his bed with twentysomething guy just may open your mind.

Author, filmmaker and NYU film school graduate Ilan Duran Cohen’s second feature, Confusion of Genders, is both explicit and restrained, sexy and sublime, gay and straight, its appeal and theme of a man’s inability to grow up is unquestionable and broad. Pascal Greggory (an award winner for his performance in Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train) plays Alain, a fortyish lawyer who was once an ugly duckling. Now he’s capable of charming anyone and, like a honeybee hovering over a garden of pretty flowers, can’t decide which to sup from first, next, or last. There’s Laurence (Nathalie Richard), a peer at his law firm, whom Alain recently got pregnant and reckons he should marry; Christophe, the frisky, gay younger brother of another ex-girlfriend; the obsessed, incarcerated, but sexy client, Marc; and Marc’s entrancing hairdresser girlfriend, Babette. “The only person he has yet to charm is himself,” Duran Cohen has remarked.Read More »