1950s

Irasema Dilián stars as the orphan Manuela whose passionate crush on her teacher Lucila (Marga Lopez) scandalizes their all-girl Catholic school. An exceptional Mexican remake of the 1931 German original, Maedchen in Uniform.Read More »

A nightclub manager is in love with his pianist. However, she has a ranger boyfriend who’s been permanently stationed in the mountain wilderness. Their only communication is by letter. As time passes the correspondence slows to a trickle. Then nothing. The manager persuades the girl to visit the boy. She does, but she’s totally unprepared for her bizarre discovery.Read More »

A japanese riff on Tarzan – this is an adventure story about a boy growing up in the wild jungle, and a safari expedition lost to it.Read More »

Atamanov’s sublime and terrifyingly beautiful masterpiece, based on a Hans Christian Andersen story, follows a resourceful young girl, Gerda (voiced by Yanina Zheymo), as she embarks on an epic journey to save her friend Kay (Anna Komolova) from the frozen embraces of the magnificent Snow Queen (Mariya Babanova.) “Had I not one day seen ‘The Snow Queen’ during a film screening hosted by the company labor union, I honestly doubt that I would have continued working as an animator.” – Hayao MiyazakiRead More »

From the DVD booklet:
Our town… is big! Maybe that’s why it has room for so many stories and events, for so many problems. Probably you’d like us to tell you a story, maybe even a love story. No. Today we’ll talk about a problem. In fact, it’s still a problem of the heart…but a problem to do with children. This is the start of a film made by Márta Mészáros during the few years she spent in Romania at the Sahia studio. The warmth of the beginning is unexpected for a film produced during one of Romania’s darkest decades. The film’s protagonists are orphans taken into care by the state and accommodated at a children’s home in Bucharest. Mészáros’s interest in the fate of children orphaned in the aftermath of the Second World War was autobiographic: as she had lost her parents as a child herself, she had first-hand experience of growing up without them.Read More »

An almost impossibly lovely, bejeweled fantasy adventure, a mixture of Ptushko’s THE STONE FLOWER and SADKO with Cocteau’s BEAUTY & THE BEAST. A ship’s captain promises his youngest daughter Nastenka (voiced by Nina Krachkovskaya) a scarlet flower as a gift. But when he plucks it, the enraged beast who owns it demands a sacrifice – and Nastenka offers herself up as the monster’s prisoner on an enchanted isle.Read More »

Setsuko is unhappily married to Mimura, an engineer with no job and a bad drinking habit. She had always been in love with Hiroshi but both of them failed to propose when Hiroshi left for France a few years ago. Now he is back and Mariko (Setsuko’s sister) tries to reunite them. She too is secretly in love with Hiroshi.Read More »

At the end of the nineteenth century, Russia, Prince Nekhlyudov, on the verge of contracting a marriage of convenience, leads a superficial and mundane life. He is appointed juror in the trial of a woman in whom he recognizes Katyusha, a woman he once seduced and abandoned pregnant.Read More »

Quote:
Two years after Jimmy Stewart chased a very special firearm, 1952 brought a flick that followed a similar concept. Springfield Rifle features Gary Cooper in a Western that involves another amazing weapon.

Set during the Civil War, Union Major Lex Kearny (Cooper) gets a dishonorable discharge related to cowardice in battle. This disrupts his life in a mix of ways, especially when his family feels shame.Read More »