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Lucio Fulci and Edwige Fenech? Yep, that’s right. Like so many other Italian directors of the time Fulci did a lot of sex comedies so perhaps it was inevitable that at some point he would have crossed paths with one of the leading actresses. In La Pretora (the French release title translates as The Judge and the Whore) Fenech plays twin sisters, one a judge and the other a porn star. Enemies of the judge devise a plan to confuse the two and create problems. Or at least that’s what seems to be happening since there’s no subtitles and they would be helpful in parts. It’s a bit slow going at first but there’s a good bit of Fenech later in the film (the screenshot of Fenech combing her pubic hair kept being deleted by the image host so I left it out). For Fulci fans this is only for completists because it’s not very Fulci-ean and has zero horror elements. It could have been done by numerous directors. Fenech fans, though, will consider it a must.Read More »
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Lucio Fulci – La Pretora aka My Sister In Law (1976)
1971-1980ComedyEroticaItalyLucio Fulci -
James Benning – BNSF (2013)
2011-2020ExperimentalJames BenningUSAJames Benning’s latest is a three hour+ shot featuring light, clouds and the much anticipated return of a BNSF train. Only info about this on the net is that a recent intended screening was cancelled.Read More »
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Alain Resnais – La vie est un roman AKA Life Is a Bed of Roses [+Extra] (1983)
1981-1990Alain ResnaisDramaFantasyFranceSYNOPSIS
On the eve of the First World War, a wealthy count, Forbek, builds a rocco pleasure dome in the French countryside. He invites his wife and his friends to live a life of idyllic seclusion inside the dome. In 1982, the same dome is the venue for a teaching seminar attended by a number of teachers with some radical ideas for educating children. Both Forbek and the seminar’s organisers are striving for similar things, the creation of a better world. Both are doomed to failure…
taken from here
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Andrea Arnold – Fish Tank (2009)
Drama2001-2010Andrea ArnoldUnited KingdomQuote:
A young girl’s life is turned upside down when her mother brings home a new boyfriendQuote:
From the start, I knew the British director Andrea Arnold had captured something volatile and splendid in Fish Tank. A girl named Katie Jarvis plays 15-year-old Mia, who in the first shots stares out the window of a high-rise, working-class tenement in London’s East End — the window of a vacant flat where she practices her hip-hop moves to the sound of music from tiny speakers.Read More » -
Yakov Protazanov – Sorok pervyy AKA The Forty-First (1927)
1921-1930DramaSilentUSSRYakov Protazanov
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The Forty-First, Boris Lavrenyev’s novella, written in only two days, has proven enduringly popular. It tells the story of a young woman snarpshooter fighting with the Reds in Turkestan. She misses her forty-first victim, a handsome White lieutenant, and ends up escorting him, by boat, into captivity across the Aral Sea. A storm, however, strands the two on an island. Sick with pneumonia, the lieutenant is nursed back to health by his Red escort, and the two fall in love. At the last, however, Mariutka shoots him dead when he tries to escape, thus making him “the forty-first.”
Sorok pervyy had been filmed as a silent, from the author’s own script, by Yakov Protazanov in 1927.Read More » -
Férid Boughedir – Un été à La Goulette AKA A Summer in La Goulette (1996)
1991-2000African CinemaComedyDramaFérid BoughedirTunisiaSynopsis
In La Goulette, a small harbour town in the Tunis suburbs, Youssef, the Muslim, Jojo, the Tunisian Jew, and Giuseppe, the Sicilian Catholic, are as inseparable as their three 16-year-old daughters, Meriem, Gigi and Tina. In a fit of provocation the three girls all swear that they’ll lose their virginity on the day of the feast of the Madonna, each with a boy from a religion different to hers ! Once this taboo is brought out into the open, all three families fall out. But the friendship between the three fathers is so strong that it reconciles them, closer than ever before… until the eve of the Israel-Arab Six Day War in 1967 that forces apart Jews and Arabs all over the world.Read More » -
John Pilger & Alan Lowery – Utopia (2013)
2011-2020Alan LoweryDocumentaryJohn PilgerPoliticsUnited KingdomThe newest documentary from, probably, the world’s greatest living journalist- John Pilger- looks at the “dysfunctional relationship” that Australians have developed with the indigenous Aborigines. Read More »
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Ming-liang Tsai – Bu san AKA Good bye, Dragon Inn (2003)
2001-2010AsianDramaMing-liang TsaiTaiwanFrom Film Journal International:
By Ethan AlterWhen you spend as much time in movie theatres as film critics and serious movie buffs do, you can’t help but wonder whether those spaces possess an inner life. What happens after the last show when the lights are turned off, the doors are locked and everybody goes home? Particularly in an older theatre, it’s easy to imagine a ghostly audience materializing in the empty auditorium as the projector flickers to life. That’s the setting evoked in Tsai Ming-liang’s latest curiosity, Goodbye, Dragon Inn. Unfolding entirely in a rundown movie theatre that’s closing its doors following the evening’s final show, the film is a slow, almost annoyingly deliberate piece of work that nevertheless lingers in your mind long after the credits roll.Read More »
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Ming-liang Tsai – Ai qing wan sui AKA Vive l’amour (1994)
1991-2000ArthouseAsianMing-liang TsaiQueer Cinema(s)TaiwanThree lonely young denizens of Taipei unknowingly share an apartment used for sexual trysts.Read More »








