Description: Over a meal in a French restaurant, Sy poses a conundrum to his fellow diners: Is the essence of life comic or tragic? For the sake of argument, he tells a story, which the others then embellish to illustrate their takes on life. The story starts as follows: A young Manhattan couple, Park Avenue princess Laurel and tippling actor Lee, throw a dinner party to impress Lee’s would-be producer when their long-lost friend Melinda appears at their front door, bedraggled and woebegone. In the tragic version of what happens next, the beautiful intruder is a disturbed woman who got bored with her Midwestern doctor-husband and dumped him for a photographer. Her husband took the children away and she spiraled into a suicidal depression that landed her straight-jacketed in a mental ward. In the comic version, Melinda is childless and a downstairs neighbor to the dinner hosts, who are ambitious Indy filmmaker Susan and under-employed actor Hobie. Back and forth the stories go, contrasting the destinies of the two Melindas.Read More »

Quote:
The older Woody Allen gets, the more the nebbish-jester mask dissolves to reveal the pinched sneerer underneath. Can a longtime comedy writer really be this unwarmed by life? In You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, the writer-director’s London-set roundelay of neurotics, muses, and frauds, the mysterious stranger of the cumbersome title turns out to be not Antonio Banderas (who joins Freida Pinto in playing insultingly “exotic” objects of desire for the rest of the cast), but, as one character points out, the Grim Reaper himself. The fact that such moldy fatalism feels truer to Allen’s worldview than, say, the faux-sensualism of Vicky Cristina Barcelona doesn’t exactly ameliorate the sourness of this ensemble dramedy, which plays less as a critique of the characters’ willful delusions than as a jaundiced hymn to their necessity.Read More »

Quote:
Roman, played by Thomas Schubert, is a 19-year-old man who has known little else than prison walls. He is serving time for murder, but is at the end of his sentence. Parole may be offered if he can hold down a job in the real world. He has tried many different vocations, but has never lasted longer than a day. With one last attempt before his hearing Roman takes on a job at an undertakers. Could this be the one that helps him find his place in society?Read More »

Synopsis
O Nosso Homem (Our Man) is a short variation in the line of the trilogy Pedro Costa has devoted to the habitants of the Fontainhas quarter, which has been destroyed in the meantime. It can be considered as a sort of appendix to the third part, Juventude en Marcha (Colossal Youth), in which the hero, Ventura, reappears as one of the four characters of this dialogue of hopelessness. They go their own way, from one setting to another, from the darkest to the brightest, carried by this lavishness of frames and timbres of light that once made Jacques Rancière (writing about Juventude en Marcha) say that “the faith in the art which attests to the greatness of the poor – the greatness of each and every man – shines here more than ever. But it does not assimilate it anymore to an affirmation of a greetingRead More »

Quote:
For my money, Abel Ferrara’s remake of a remake — namely Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, based on Don Siegel’s classically paranoid 1956 SF adaptation of Jack Finney’s effective novel The Body Snatchers — doesn’t match the Siegel original, though it’s a lot scarier and more memorable than Kaufman’s low-key, new-agey version. Kaufman shifted the action from a small California town to San Francisco, while Ferrara–shooting a script by Stuart Gordon, Dennis Paoli, and Nicholas St. John from a screen story by Raymond Cistheri and Larry Cohen — locates the action in an Army compound in Alabama. Read More »

Plot:Director Abel Ferrara applies his eccentric vision to the vampire genre with this cerebral “Art”film about graduate philosophy student Kathleen Conklin (Lili Taylor), who is bitten by anaggressive female vampire (Annabella Sciorra) and soon spirals into a nightmarish world ofblood addiction and existential angst. Driven by her merciless condition, she attacks severalof her pretentious friends and classmates (even her professor) and mainlines their blood likeheroin. Just as she becomes more bold in seeking prey on the streets of New York, she iswaylaid by a potential victim — actually a sophisticated vampire himself named Peina(Christopher Walken), who chooses to control his own blood addiction through fasting andmeditation.Read More »

Description: A mute woman gets raped twice coming home from work and decides to take matters into her own hands. She dresses suggestively and roams the streets alone, reaking vengeance upon anyone who tries to take advantage of her. Eventually her secret life spills over into her regular life in the fashion industry.Read More »

Description:
A screwball comedy centered on a Manhattan go-go dancing club, where a financial struggle between the owner, his accountant and his silent partner brother threatens the business’s future.Read More »

This is a rare little gem from Turkey. The quality (and production values) leave a bit to be desired, but it more than makes up for it in entertainment! I have NEVER seen a movie quite like this, and in fact, at times I’m not quite sure if it’s meant to be taken serious or tongue in cheek.

Presumably, in a previous film/episode (that from what I’ve been able to determine, doesn’t even exist!), Kilink was killed by his former partner, a doctor, once they discovered some mysterious formula to make the most powerful bombs ever. Now Kilink wants revenge, and to then take over the world!Read More »