Thriller (aka. Boris Karloff’s Thriller) was an hour-long TV Horror anthology series that originally aired on NBC from 1960 to 1962. Horror fans who grew up in the 1960’s and 1970’s were nearly enraptured with the content and structure of this show. Indeed, in his non-fiction book on horror, Danse Macabre, Stephen King calls Thriller “the best horror series ever put on TV” (224; 1983 ed). At the beginning of each hour, Hollywood’s master of the macabre himself, Boris Karloff, would set the tone and prime the viewers for frightful and chilling dramatizations based on the works of some of the era’s greatest writers in the genre – writers like Robert E Howard, Cornell Woolrich, Richard Matheson, and Robert Bloch. Each episode was shot in eerie black and white and offered at least one story, with a few episodes dividing the hour between two or three shorter plays.Read More »

Camilo is a quiet man who works for a cleaning company in Montreal. He used to run a successful restaurant called Le Coyote, but he has been struggling to find work in the culinary field since his establishment went out of business. An old friend offers him a position as a chef in the suburbs. Just when it looks like life will cut him a break, his estranged daughter lands on his doorstep, announcing that she has a grandson, Zachary.Read More »

Quote:
‘We can’t easily tell night from day during the summers here,” observes one character early on in Hong Sang-soo’s Paris-set Night and Day—a nearly throwaway line that circumscribes the sense of physical and spiritual dislocation felt by the film’s protagonist. Like most of the director’s leading men, Kim Sung-nam (Kim Yeong-ho) is a hangdog, self-absorbed, soju-guzzling Hong alter ego—a fortyish Korean artist who flees to the City of Lights after an episode of recreational drug use leads him to believe he is under police investigation. There, he rents a room in a crowded boarding house and resolves to lay low until he can safely return home to his wife, Sung-in (Hwang Su-jeong), or else find a way to bring her to France. But resolutions aside, it isn’t long before Sung-nam finds himself navigating Hong’s trademark gauntlet of awkward seductions, casual betrayals, and ghosts of girlfriends past.Read More »

Quote:
Following up on his acclaimed debut feature, Kichiku Dai Enkai — an intense portrait of a band of 1970s radicals who descend into morass of fratricidal blood lust — Kazuyoshi Kumakiri shifts gears completely by offering this understated romantic drama. Ichio (Takeshi Kitano regular Susumu Terajima) runs a rundown eatery on a Hokkaido highway. One day, a couple gets into a spat resulting in the guy — an overly tanned self-satisfied clod — hopping in his red sports car and driving off without her. The woman, Taeko (Rinko Kikuchi), returns to order a meal. When she tries to dash without paying, Ichio nabs her but lets her off with a warning. Ichio soon finds himself similarly stranded when his horseracing-mad father — and owner of the restaurant — swipes Ichio’s car for a crazed gambling road trip with his buddies. Later that night while camping out, Taeko inadvertently burns down one of the restaurant’s sheds. This time around, Ichio puts Taeko to work. Soon, in spite of themselves, a relationship is born.
~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie GuideRead More »

Synopsis:
Étienne, a modest carpenter, believes he has found the perfect partner in Irène, a beautiful young woman who appears to be devoted to him. But Irène is not the simple housemaid she pretends to be. In truth, she is the wife of a wealthy man, living in a grand house where she plays hostess at her frequent soirées to the cream of Parisian society. Irène is content with her double life until the day she discovers she is pregnant with Étienne’s child. After the baby is born, Irène promises to marry Étienne, without telling him that she must first persuade her present husband to agree to a divorce. Étienne’s hopes for future happiness are dashed when the business he attempts to set up fails and his child falls dangerously ill. The final blow comes when he visits Irène at the house where she claims to work and discovers the truth that she has long concealed from him…
— James Travers .Read More »

“Alain Tanner’s sparse, beautiful film is a philosophical reflection on and a poetic, atmospheric representation of human homelessness.”

Synopsis:
“No man’s land” tells the story of four people trying to fulfil their most basic desires in life. A group of young people meet up regularly in a nightclub situated in a former customs house on the Swiss-French border, as a means of escape from their drab lives. No Man’s Land is an “in- between” film. Between staying and leaving, between Paul and Jean, about friendship, between Paul and Madeleine, Jean and Mali, Jean and Lucie, about love. Between Paul and his route of escape, Jean and his territory, Madeleine and her music, Mali and her exile.Read More »

A major foreshadowing of Paradjanov’s later work, the visually prodigious Andriesh is an entertaining tale about a young shepherd who is given a magic shawm (a flutelike instrument) to help him conquer his foes. With its flying sheep, evil wizards, and storm demons—all captured in the gloriously artifical palette of fifties Soviet color stock—Andriesh has the kind of eye-popping, whirlwind weirdness of Paradjanov’s last films, Suram Fortress and Ashik Kerib.Read More »

PLOT: After stealing a gangster’s money and his girlfriend, a doctor heads for a small village in Mexico to hide out.Read More »

Observations of three varied corners of China’s garment industry: workers in a large-scale production line factory; a designer who rallies against the mass-machine-production of clothes and has created the eponymous hand-made collection called ‘Useless’ (Wuyong) for Paris Fashion Week; and finally the simple life of increasingly out-of-work tailors in small town Fengdang.Read More »