Martijn (Ryan Phillippe) is a Jazz pianist living in Holland who says goodbye to his girlfriend (Touriya Haoud) so he can travel to Morocco for a presentation to a food charity. He is being accompanied by professional bodyguard, Gavin (Colm Meaney), who is hired to protect him but they are kidnapped shortly after their arrival. The gang of kidnappers are led by Ahmet (Laurence Fishburne) and they begin to torture Martijn, hoping to find the true motives of his arrival.Read More »
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In a nameless Chinese city, a mother with her daughter missing refuses to go gentle into this good night.Read More »
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Made by the Polish Telegraphic Agency, this reportage shows the construction and operation of the modern cargo port in Gdynia and its facilities. It is a typical example of a propaganda film of the second half of the 1930s, showing the rapid development of the young country and its growing economic power. The film has been digitised based on a copy imported from the Soviet Union in 1980.Read More »
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The Scribe is a 1966 short comedy film directed by John Sebert and produced by the Construction Safety Association of Ontario, Canada. It demonstrates the do’s and don’ts of construction site safety.
The film is the last professionally filmed footage of film legend Buster Keaton shot months before his death from lung cancer on February 1 1966. He recreates several routines from his youth, as well as some new material for the film. Most notable was his recreation of a gag from his 1918 film The Bell Boy in which he mops the floor using only the tip of the mop, little by little while sitting on the floor.Read More »
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“Slacker” is a movie with an appeal almost impossible to describe, although the method of the director, Richard Linklater, is as clear as day. He wants to show us a certain strata of campus life at the present time — a group of people he calls “slackers,” although anyone who has ever lived in a campus town will also recognize them under such older names as beatniks, hippies, bohemians, longhairs, peaceniks, weirdos or the Union Regulars (for surely every campus with a student union also has a seemingly permanent body of current and former students who hang around all day drinking free coffee refills and wondering whether life as they know it exists outside the union).Read More »
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With an ensemble cast of both Israeli and Palestinian actors, “Laila in Haifa” explores the interweaving stories of five women set over one night in a club in the port town of Haifa. Laced with wry humor, Amos Gitai presents a candid snapshot of contemporary life in one of the last remaining spaces where Israelis and Palestinians come together to engage in face‐to‐face relationships.Read More »
The partnership between director František Vláčil and screenwriter Vladimír Körner yielded films including Adelheid (Adelheid, 1969), Pověst o stříbrné jedli (The Legend of the Silver Fir, 1973) and Stín kapradiny (The Shadow of a Ferns, 1984). But it is the historical drama Údolí včel (The Valley of the Bees, 1967) that is widely regarded as the pair’s greatest collaborative achievement. Released in cinemas shortly after Vláčil’s highly acclaimed Marketa Lazarová (Marketa Lazarová, 1967), The Valley of the Bees came about as a result of efforts to reuse the props and costumes from the director’s previous opus – hitherto the most expensive Czechoslovak film of all time. Körner’s compact concept is very different from the ambitious, expansive adaptation of author Vladislav Vančura’s historical novel Marketa Lazarová. While the former film told the story of Christianity’s battle with paganism, The Valley of the Bees is more of a timeless picture representing a battle between asceticism and freedom. Read More »
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With the aforementioned anti-biography, 39-year-old Damien Odoul, author of the film L’Histoire de Richard O., brings in something of his own nature into the main character Richard O (Mathieu Amalric), who, together with his best friend (Stéphane Terpereau) lives an anarchical life, filled up with crazy sex which proves fatal. His love partners are women selected by video tapes who are needed for future erotic films and that is the starting inspiration for Richard O. to involve us in his sex-video anarchy. This courageous film shows us a totally different Amalric who is simply perfect as Richard O. In one typical sequence, being on the bank of the river Sena with a girl, after having mad-sex, Richard O. with all the anarchy in himself yells at the passing boat with tourists: “Hey tourists! Paris doesn’t give a shit for you!”Read More »
Temujin, who later became Genghis Khan is wise, or sometimes cunning. He goes through several heroic episodes; competing at the Man of Men contest, falling in love with the enemy commander’s daughter, and struggling to restore his demolished hometown. Meanwhile his steps guide him to be a great conqueror. Khan’s witty, humorous side in his adolescent years before he takes the throne.Read More »