A student work by Jiří Menzel, filmed during his second year at the FAMU film school. Views of old Prague and its tenement buildings, symbolising the obsolete past, alternate with shots of construction sites for new prefabricated apartment buildings. In spite of certain unavoidable propagandistic overtones added by the director, it is notable as the beginning of his search for a “dramaturgy of colours.”Read More »
The great unknown masterpiece of mid-century Australian cinema, Clay is unlike anything made in the country before or since. The story of the film is really the sad story of Mangiamele’s career; shown to acclaim at Cannes, no local distributor would show the film, so the director was forced to hire a cinema in Melbourne to screen it himself. There are many influences here, but to me it evokes New Wave cinema from Eastern Europe as much as anything else. Don’t expect great dialogue, or great acting, and there are profound technical issues (the poor sound synch is typical of Mangiamele’s work, but he never had any money for post-production, to the extent that his earlier feature Il Contratto exists only in silent form with no soundtrack at all). But it is a deeply philosophical film, crammed with evocative imagery, and above all the extraordinary cinematography in high contrast (almost Tarr-esque) monochrome is miraculous. And it will be even more evocative for those who know the Montsalvat artist community near Melbourne, where much of the film was shot.Read More »
Synopsis:
Gerardo, an aspiring actor, trying unsuccessfully to cross over from comedy to tragedy, is involved, due to his ability to mimic dialects of Italy, in a scam concocted by Lallo against a rich cloth-merchant.Read More »
Quote:
“No film is so enchanting but ultimately tragic as Le Grand Meaulnes, based on the classic novel of the same title written by Alain-Fournier, his only novel published the year after he was killed in the first World War.
I’ll need to start with the novel since it is so fundamental to the film. Whoever read it in their youth can never forget it. It influenced Jack Kerouac, and thus became the only book that Sal Paradise carried with him in On the Road. Author John Fowles considered it “the greatest novel of adolescence in European literature.” In the U.S, it is usually translated as The Wanderer, a fitting title.Read More »
Quote:
Old crone matron Claris Manning, who redefines the word “crotchety” with every bourbon-fueled blast from her mangled maw, just can’t believe that her ditzy daughter Carol has invited the money hungry members of her hated family over for a holiday get together. Seems that the wealthy witch wishes that her offal offspring would simply make like a group of in testate inheritors and drop dead. No sooner do the bequest buffoons show up at the ratty old mansion than one by one they proceed to push up some pretty unpleasant daises. Some are stabbed. Read More »
If one movie captures the soul of a city, this is the one. Dealing with the social problems, telling the story of three brothers, sometimes tender, sometimes raw, Aldo Francia made a masterpiece showing us a Chilean neorealism movie. The dark and natural cinematography goes very well with this feature. The bitter story of a family with a father in jail, a mother and three brothers fighting against poverty and an unfair society, who rejects them even between another rejected people. Francia makes this bitter story with no weeping scenes or political speeches: is very real, very beautiful and very shocking.Read More »
Five people, all united by the fact of being on a train to Monte Carlo, will find themselves being involved in the murder of an elderly millionaire of Dutch origin, a regular guest of the glamorous Riviera location….Read More »
Baron Frankenstein has the body of a young woman and all it lacks is the spark of life. He captures the soul of a recently executed young man and installs it in the young maiden, Christina. With the memories from the young man still intact, she starts to kill the people whose false accusations led to the young man’s execution.Read More »
