Wayne Wang’s follow-up movie to Smoke (1995) presents a series of improvisational situations strung together to form a pastiche of Brooklyn’s diverse ethnicity, offbeat humor, and essential humanity. Many of the same characters inhabiting Auggie Wren’s Brooklyn Cigar Store in Smoke (1995) return here to expound on their philosophy of smoking, relationships, baseball, New York City, and Belgian Waffles. Most of all, this is a movie about living life, off-the-cuff.Read More »
Is it man, beast or both behind a string of savage maulings and murders? An escaped leopard provides the catalyst for a foray into fear in which a cemetery is the rendezvous for death and love, and a closed door heightens rather than hides the horror of a young girl’s fate. The Leopard Man once again teams producer Val Lewton with director Jacques Tourneur (Cat People). This thriller stars Dennis O’Keefe (T-Men, Raw Deal), Margo (Lost Horizon) and Jean Brooks (The Seventh Victim).Read More »
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“HANDS is an ingenious piece of propaganda that communicates not only through the thrust of its content, but through the very unconventionality of its “experimental” structure. The film suggests that the government that produced it is imaginative and inventive, open to new possibilities, and supportive of forms of free expression.” – Scott MacDonaldRead More »
Extremely rare and interesting Croatian movie about the history of the city of Zadar from 1918-1943.
A brief historical background:
After Napoleonic Wars and controversial Congress of Vienna (1814-1815) , Zadar was a capitol city of Austro-Hungarian Empire’s province Kingdom Of Dalmatia from 1815-1918.
Based on a a secret pact between the Triple Entente and Italy, signed in London on 26 April 1915, and known as Treaty of London (1915), Kingdom of Italy claimed large parts of former Austro-Hungarian Empire after the end of WW I. Finally, after the Treaty of Rapallo (1920), large parts of territories inhabited with 480.000 Croats and Slovenians were given to Italy.Read More »
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An under-valued classic
Fritz Lang’s superlative western teeters dangerously on the edge of campness, (it’s that infernal ‘Legend of Chuck-a-Luck’ ballad pounding away on the soundtrack, continually reminding us that this is a tale of ‘hate … murder and revenge’). Then, of course, there is that great gay icon Marlene Dietrich, looking extraordinary at fifty one as Altar Keane, boss of the outlaw hideout Chuck-a-Luck where Arthur Kennedy comes seeking the man who killed his girl in a robbery. In many respects the film is a perfect companion to Nicholas Ray’s not dissimilar “Johnny Guitar”, made around the same time and both featuring dominant women and weaker men and both dealing explicitly with ‘hate, murder and revenge’.Read More »
From the blu-ray cover:
Henri Storck (Ostend 1907 – Brussels 1999) lived through the whole history of cinema, passing from silent to sound, and from experimental to commercial films. He is recognised as a pioneer of Belgian cinema and a key figure in documentary. Misère au Borinage, which he co-directed with Joris Ivens in 1933, has become a classic of the ‘cinema of reality’ with which he was most closely associated.Read More »
Synopsis:
In the black market, a war orphan is confronted with the struggles of people living in the immediate aftermath of WWII.Read More »
Set in Istanbul, the film opens with a surprisingly candid scene of Baldwin leisurely awakening in his bedroom. Sedat Pakay, a Turkish filmmaker who studied with Walker Evans, is known for his photographic portraits of famous artists and writers, Baldwin among them. Here in Istanbul, Baldwin seems relatively relaxed, walking among crowds in a public park or on the city’s streets. His focus is personal, even intimate: “The life I live is very different from what people imagine. I love a few men. I love a few women. Love comes in many strange packages; it never comes to you as you think it will. I think the trick is to say yes to life.” He speaks of how difficult it is concentrate and to write in the United States and says that “American men are paranoiac on the subject of homosexuality.” The film offers us a self-reflective James Baldwin, one who fearlessly examines his most private thoughts and feelings.Read More »
“Death is good” is how producer Val Lewton summarized the message of his films, a credo that received its most explicit expression in this strikingly nihilistic shocker, the first film directed by regular Lewton editor Mark Robson. Kim Hunter makes her film debut as a young boarding-school student who, in search of her missing sister (proto-goth icon Jean Brooks), travels to New York’s bohemian Greenwich Village, where she uncovers a sinister shadow world of devil-worshippers and murder. And what about that mysterious room furnished with nothing but a chair and a hangman’s noose? With its daring treatment of depression and queerness, The Seventh Victim has haunted the margins of cinema for decades, its radical bleakness undiminished by time.Read More »