Plot description from IMDB: “O.C. and Stiggs aren’t your average unhappy teenagers. They not only despise their suburban surroundings, they plot against it. They seek revenge against the middle class Schwab family, who embody all they detest: middle class.”Read More »
This film is a typical representative of the Serbian 60s Black Wave film. It attacks some social aspects of Tito’s communist regime, depicting two practically indigenous brothers that came from a small highland village and joined the communist partisans in WWII. After the war, they return to their village, revealing to each other that each has stolen a submachine gun from the army. It’s social critique is quite obvious, according to the film trend in Yugoslavia of that time. It’s plot line is blurred by some surreal inserted symbolical shots. Whereas some of these are brilliant , some of these are quite hard to explain and comprehend. A great film to be seen, (quite hefty cinematography) with some extraordinary choices in visual composition of the contents of particular shots. However, some parts are bit confusing, even more so, I assume, to the non-Yugoslavian audience.Read More »
Quote: Lutz Eisholz’s first feature film was produced at West Berlin’s German Film and TV Academy. In an experimental documentary he portrays the working class outcast Bruno S., who prowls the city as a street musician, performing his own songs. The film unfolds Bruno’s story: abandoned by his mother as a child, he was maltreated in correctional institutions in Nazi Germany. On release after WWII he found work but started performing at the same time as a self-taught musician and poet. Although incapable of “normal” human bonding, he was still able to rejoice in life. When Werner Herzog saw this film he recognized Bruno’s potential and hired him to play starring roles in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974), Heart of Glass (1976) and Stroszek (1977). –UCLA Library Film & Television ArchiveRead More »
Two families of Moroccan rug-makers are contrasted in this award-winning French-language film. The poor family makes its living by dyeing the wool used in the rugs made in the richer family’s factory. When the boss of the factory refuses to see the son of the poor family following an accident which has injured his father, the poor son breaks into the boss’s house. He is met by unsupportable abuse from the rich wife, who flogs him for dirtying her carpets.Read More »
Volodymyr Denysenko’s searing partisan drama is a neglected masterpiece of Soviet Ukrainian cinema. Recounting a partisan attack on a Nazi officer and the brutal recriminations that follow, Vasyl Zemliak’s quasi-autobiographical script draws on his own experiences in occupied rural Ukraine during World War Two. Denysenko renders Zemliak’s existentialist drama of conviction and sacrifice in starkly poetic visuals, accompanied by the discordant score of Krzysztof Penderecki. Conscience was shot as a diploma project in an effort to evade the censors, but was still denied a release and only screened in 1989. Reminiscent of Larisa Shepitko’s The Ascent, it is less celebrated than its contemporaries in the Ukrainian “poetic cinema” movement, but remains a clarion call of anti-war filmmaking.Read More »
PLOT: In the French legal system, a judge-magistrate conducts criminal investigations. In this story, Suzanne Corbier (Annie Girardot) is one such magistrate who is called upon to determine whether Catherine, who has been having an affair with an Englishman, conspired with him to murder her impotent husband, who condoned the affair. When Suzanne comes to a conclusion, she still must deal with the political demands of her office and her superiors.Read More »
Quote: A henchman of Satan poses as a priest in order to get closer to young virgins he needs for human sacrifice.
Cheap, oddly acted misfire
Low budget English film set in the 18th century about a Satanist brought back to life when the blood of a virgin drops onto his tomb. As he sets about trying to find a willing virgin to spend an eternity in Hell thus ending his damnation (I don’t understand it either) two lovers, the daughter of a rich nobleman and a young man who is slowly buying up the land in the area, try to find away to be together.Read More »