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Director Yashaswini Raghunandan has a perceptive sense of humour. Her film That Cloud Never Left opens with a title card that reads, “This is a work of fiction. Only people, places, and the work are real. For the rest, any resemblance to anything that might have actually happened or dreamt of is purely co-incidental.”Read More »
This is a lovely colorful adaptation of a novel by Anton Chekhov about the adventures of Jegoruska, an eight-year-old Russian boy, in a journey across the “steppe” or open plains of Russia on the en route from his home village to a market city where he is to go to school. It is in a way an allegorical trip which exposes him to some of the grimmest realities of life and some of its better ones. We get a social message as well, for example, the harsh conditions of the peasantry of 19th Century Russia. The director Alberto Lattuada often adapted Russian works or made films with Russian settings as in CUORE DI CANE, THE TEMPEST, and THE OVERCOAT. Most of the location scenes here were shot in Yugoslavia. The cast, which includes Charles Vanel as a priest and Marina Vlady as a countess, are uniformly good. Handsome young Daniele Spallone as the boy is marvelous.Read More »
A road trip through Louisiana transforms three strangers who were originally brought together by their respective feelings of loneliness.Read More »
Gripping, tense and dark the whole duration through, Angel of Mine concludes with an excellent ending, as desperation to be a mother results in a very surprising conclusion. It is astonishing that the film has been based on real life events.Read More »
Bette Gordon’s first film, made in collaboration with James Benning, is both an investigation of the relationship between two women and a formalist study of cinematic syntax.Read More »
Two criminal gangs are ruthlessly fighting for a 1-million dollar check that, purely by chance, got into the flat of shy high school teacher George Camel. As the number of victims sharply increases, Camel is mistakenly regarded as a mass murderer and cunningly uses his horrifying reputation to get the respect and heart of his beloved Sabrina, a journalist from a local newspaper. But this game turns out to be risky and in the end, both gangs don’t hesitate to seize the check at all costs, including an improvised operation.Read More »
The spirit, hopes, and failures of a troupe of itinerant performers in the 1950s create a poignant, humorous leitmotif in this drama by Fernando Fernan-Gomez. The story of the wandering players is told in flashbacks, as Carlos Galvan (Jose M. Sacristan) reminisces about the good times while under therapy with a psychiatrist in a senior citizens’ home. Carlos and his lover Juanita (Laura del Sol), his teenage son, his father, and a few other actors try to eke out a living by putting on shows in small towns and villages. No one has very much money, but life is lived to the hilt, and Carlos himself has some pretty tall tales.Read More »
A Western couple (played by Melissa Leo and James Wilby) working in Pakistan visit an unconventional holy shrine to harness its spiritual powers to help them conceive a child. They are lavished with the attentions of the shrine’s leader (an exceptional performance from Zia Mohyeddin – Lawrence of Arabia, Khartoum) and her followers, but their methods and motives are not all that they seem, and the couple’s lives are plunged into darkness.
This ravishing, unsettling film from director Jamil Dehlavi (The Blood of Hussain, Born of Fire) is a deeply personal work which raises questions of cultural and sexual identity, religious fanaticism and the abuses of power. The brand-new 2K restoration from the original negative was supervised and approved by Dehlavi and cinematographer Nic Knowland.Read More »
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Lesbian-themed tale of a schoolgirl who entices her gullible (not to mention slightly warped) female teacher by positing that they are predestined to dance together on the day the world ends. The screenplay was titled “The Gods Have a Nervous Breakdown,” which should give some idea of the symbiotic descent into psychosexual dementia that ensues. Rei Takaki co-stars with Shoichiro Sakata and Asako Shirakawa.Read More »