1950s

While working as a counselor at a summer camp, college-student Marjorie Morgenstern falls for 32-year-old Noel Airman, a would-be dramatist working at a nearby summer theater. Like Marjorie, he is an upper-middle-class New York Jew (born ‘Ehrman’), but has fallen away from his roots, and Marjorie’s parents object among other things to his lack of a suitable profession, such as medicine or law. Noel himself warns Marjorie repeatedly that she’s much too naive and conventional for him, but they nonetheless fall in love. As they pursue an on-again-off-again relationship, Marjorie completes her studies at Hunter College, and works to establish an acting career, while Noel first leaves the theater for a job with an advertising agency, but later completes a musical he’d started writing before he and Marjorie had first met.Read More »

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Plan 9 From Outer Space has been unjustly deemed the worst movie of all time. It’s true that cardboard gravestones are knocked over, that scenes change from day to night at a moment’s notice, and that half of Bela Lugosi’s scenes are shot with a taller stand-in who has trouble keeping his vampire’s cape on his shoulders. But technical gaffes like these are shared by a number of low-budget sci-fi films with plots that equal the absurdity of this epic’s tale of extraterrestrial grave robbers.Read More »

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Ella Fitzgerald, backed by the Oscar Peterson Trio, sings “Tenderly” as watercolor animation portrays life and love in a big city. Simple and marvelous.Read More »

Francisco is rich, strict on principles, and still a bachelor. He meets Gloria by accident, and is intent on marrying her and courts her until she agrees. Now he is a dedicated husband, but his passion starts to exhibit disturbing traits.Read More »

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A new priest (Claude Laydu) arrives in the French country village of Ambricourt to attend to his first parish. The apathetic and hostile rural congregation rejects him immediately. Through his diary entries, the suffering young man relays a crisis of faith that threatens to drive him away from the village and from God. With his fourth film, Robert Bresson began to implement his stylistic philosophy as a filmmaker, stripping away all inessential elements from his compositions, the dialogue and the music, exacting a purity of image and sound.Read More »

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Odds Against Tomorrow, a crackling crime caper with an undercurrent of racial tension, combines the desperation of three men–two of whom hate each other–and the culmination of that desperation in the form of a robbery. The film, which includes a fantastic jazz score by pianist John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet, is a film noir gem. David Burke (Ed Begley), a former policeman who once served a prison sentence, has asked bigoted southerner Earl Slater (Robert Ryan) to rob an upstate bank with him, promising him $50,000 in small bills if the robbery is successful.Read More »

Synopsis
A Generation is set in Wola, a working-class section of Warsaw, in 1942 and tells the stories of two young men at odds with the Germans occupation of Poland. The young protagonist, Stach (Tadeusz Łomnicki), is living in squalor on the outskirts of the city and carrying out wayward acts of theft and rebellion. After a friend is killed attempting to heist coal from a German supply train, he finds work as an apprentice at a furniture workshop, where he becomes involved in an underground communist resistance cell guided first by a friendly journeyman there who in turn introduces Stach to the beautiful Dorota (Urszula Modrzyńska). An outsider, Jasio Krone (Tadeusz Janczar), the temperamental son of an elderly veteran, is initially reluctant to join the struggle but finally commits himself, running relief operations in the Jewish ghetto during the uprising there.Read More »

When a handful of settlers survive an Apache attack on their wagon train they must put their lives into the hands of Comanche Todd, a white man who has lived with the Comanches most of his life and is wanted for the murder of three men..Read More »

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Three good men – a broken boxer, an American veteran trying to win back his mother-dominated wife, and an Air Force Sergeant married to a faithless actress – are corrupted by Miles “Rave” Ravenscourt (Laurence Harvey), an amoral “gentleman”. Because they need money, they let Miles lure them into his scheme to rob a postal van with a large cash cargo.Read More »