Summary
One rainy night, a stranger arrives in a nondescript seaside town and checks into a cheap hotel. All that is known about him is his name – Pierre – and everyone he meets is suspicious of him. He appears to know the area well; he looks to be in good health. But why is he here? Why is he so sad? The answers emerge when another man appears on the scene, an acquaintance of Pierre who knows the crime that he has committed and who intends to use the information to his own advantage…Read More »

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Tinto Brass somewhat reigns in the more comic and explicit aspects of his brand of erotica for this well-made tale of a couple in post-war Italy trying to recapture the magic of their wartime romances with other lovers. Fred (blues musician Andy J. Forest, who did a handful of Italian movies in the late eighties), an American soldier now working for UNESCO assessing the state of Roman art after the war, reconnects with a prostitute Rosa (Francesca Dellera) while former British nurse Jennifer (Nicola Warren) waits apparently in vain to meet up with Ciro (Luigi Laezza), a waiter/pimp who pursued her years before. Jennifer’s part of the film is dominated by flashbacks and tormented narration as she professes her love for her absent Italian. Fred’s part of the film has he and Rosa on the road with his attempts to relive their whore-client dalliances complicated by Rosa’s wanting more from him.Read More »

This astonishing, scintillating collection from the silent era, most of which are from the 1920s, are genuine, legitimate and by today’s hardcore standards, amazingly charming, pornographic short films that leave nothing to the imagination. From predictable fantasy scenarios – monk spies on, then joins naughty nuns; teacher must spank naughty schoolgirls – to more esoteric fare (homosexuality and animal ecstasy, to name just two), vintage porn has never been more accessible…or attainable. The shorts in The Good Old Naughty Days were primarily designed to be shown in the waiting rooms of brothels, amusing patrons – and no doubt giving them some ideas – as they awaited their girl. They also reveal production standards far in advance of comparable films being made elsewhere at the time, as well as an inventive and often humorous array of diverse couplings. These films were usually created in a haphazard fashion in an afternoon with friends and local prostitutes lending a hand for a few cents. All of them requested to remain anonymous, which makes it impossible to identify who really acted or directed them. For this reason, it is rather delightful to watch these “actors” often having to readjust their wigs and fake moustaches in the middle of their scenes so as not to be recognized unmasked. It is nevertheless touching to see how fresh and naïve these films look in comparison with today’s X-rated film productions. Considering the age of these films, it is miraculous that they have been rediscovered and restored. These films are a part of our heritage and certainly a part of the secret history of cinema. In their own amusing way, these images involve us in a very direct, physical and intimate relationship with the good old days. These films have been restored by the Archives of the Centre National de la Cinématographie in France.Read More »

Criterion Collection wrote:
Masaki Kobayashi’s mammoth humanist drama is one of the most staggering achievements of Japanese cinema. Originally filmed and released in three parts, the nine-and-a-half-hour The Human Condition (Ningen no joken), adapted from Junpei Gomikawa’s six-volume novel, tells of the journey of the well-intentioned yet naive Kaji (handsome Japanese superstar Tatsuya Nakadai) from labor camp supervisor to Imperial Army soldier to Soviet POW. Constantly trying to rise above a corrupt system, Kaji time and again finds his morals an impediment rather than an advantage. A raw indictment of its nation’s wartime mentality as well as a personal existential tragedy, Kobayashi’s riveting, gorgeously filmed epic is novelistic cinema at its best.Read More »

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This film was originally shot by Father Norbert Weber (1870-1956), head of the Missionary Benedictines, during his second visit to Korea in 1925 on some 15,000 meters of raw film. Fr. Weber was abbot of the archabbey of St. Ottilien in Germany and made the film in order to show the country, its culture, and the order’s activities to people back in Germany. It was first screened there in 1927..Read More »

A boy’s sleep disturbed by the weaking, and the sound of reality. Found-footage montage with the chemical reactions of the celluloid on rare erotic s8 reels.

23. Festival Premiers Plans d’Angers – free forms section (2011)
MADATAC Video Art Festival, Madrid; 2011
8. International Super8 festival – Szeged: Best hungarian film; Audience award; 2009
41. Hungarian Film week: Award of the most promising young talent; 2010
The Canton Palace Theatre First Annual International Film Festival – Ohio ; 2010
Kalgart underground evening, Istambul; 2010
An evening with Cinema 16,- The Kitchen, New York (2011)
San Francisco – MisALT series – 2011Read More »

The film speaks about universal themes of love, hate and search for love. The portrait of three women represents these three states. Tanya Neubivko has never been in love but optimistically is searing for it. Her unfortunate and even dangerous encounters with strangers on dates almost got her killed. Rita is happily engaged and planning a wedding after a routine medical check-up. Nadya is a very unhappy doctor who hates her husband and finds relief in alcohol. The story takes place in a surreal hospital with the leaking roof and hollow walls and constantly smoking doctors, where Rita is destined to die.Read More »

Clara Manni (Lucia Bosé, so good in Antonioni’s A Story of a Love Affair), a Milan shop girl, is discovered on the street and used for a bit part in a movie. That single part brings her immediate celebrity, and with the coaxing of her producer, Gianni, she becomes a screen sex symbol. She has great success in several sex comedy vehicles, but Gianni decides to push her into the world of the art film in order to attain artistic legitimacy and respect. She never wishes for this, since money is never an issue to her, but she is pushed head first into a production of Joan of Arc. The film is brutally attacked by the critics, and Clara’s dignity and identity are thrown into question in the harrowing final shot.Read More »

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‘Quad’, the first in a series of minimalist experimental television plays made by Beckett in the 1980s for the broadcaster Süddeutscher Rundfunk, operates with a serial game involving the motional pattern of four actors, but equally accommodating four soloists, six duos, and four trios. Four actors, whose coloured hoods make them identifiable yet anonymous, accomplish a relentless closed-circuit drama. Once inside the square, they are condemned to monotonously and synchronously pace the respectively six steps of the lengthwise and diagonal lines it contains, in part accompanied by varying drumbeat rhythms.Read More »