1960s

From Allmovie:
Government bureaucracy and ineptitude, as well as social foibles, get a drubbing in this socio-political satire by director Fernando Birri. Everything starts when the families in a poor, mud-hut neighborhood lose what little they own in a bad flood. In steps the militia to rescue them, and then the local government comes next as the politicos hope to gain points by relocating the group of unfortunates. Nothing goes right for the essentially honest, simple villagers who are now the dispossessed. One family seeks temporary shelter in a boxcar and ends up being attached to a train that then takes them on an interesting journey. Meanwhile, no one seems able to help them out and when the hubbub has died down, the families are not much different than when the flood first washed them out. Director Fernando Birri was particularly interested in Neorealism and would eventually move to Cuba.Read More »

Quote:
“A long setting of a basement window to the street. Slower and stopping down the street brothers in Hamburg (where Nekes lives). A stand of the belly of a girl on her legs and her dress. Then, vagina and penis, as they are complementary. The 60-minute film is silent. The canvas, as in previous Nekes movies, to the canvas of the painter. It does not look in an imaginary space, one sees an area that is divided divided, with each cut and replaced by a new canvas. In particular, an impression: strong, cool calculation. It stands there like a block. Immovable. The picture is so much that it is beyond the linguistically appropriate formulation. One must see that.” – Werner KließRead More »

When a wealthy man dies, his avaricious relatives look forward to inheriting all his money. However, he leaves a provision in his will that they all must spend a week together in his castle before they will be able to inherit anything. At the castle (which is cut off from the outside world), the relatives soon begin to be killed off one by one, each strangled with an Indian scarf. The estate’s executor, a lawyer, sets out to find the killer before everyone–including himself–is murdered.Read More »

From Allmovie:
Adapted from the Robert Bloch short story “The Skull of the Marquis de Sade,” this inventive gothic chiller from Amicus stars Peter Cushing as Professor Maitland, a collector obsessed with obtaining artifacts reputed to have occult powers — including the title object, believed to be from the crypt of the notorious French nobleman. Shortly after the Professor brings home his latest find, the skull begins making nightly rounds (the gliding camera peers through the eye sockets for the nifty “skull-cam” point-of-view shots) before eventally dominating Maitland’s will. Despite the potentially cheesy premise (which sounds better suited to a William Castle project), the film is remarkably subtle and spooky thanks to the deft hand of director Freddie Francis and an excellent performance from Cushing.Read More »

Quote:
Unusual both because, as Näripea states, it “lacks the ideological markers of Soviet life” and because it features an unmarried mother as one of its main characters, Arūnas Žebriūnas’s Lithuanian The Beauty (Gražuolé) focuses on free-spirited nine-year-old Inga (Inga Mickyte), whose self-confidence is shattered when a new neighbour declares her ugly, opening up her early rite of passage into the adult world of disillusionment that her single mother (Lilija Zadeikyte) already fully occupies.Read More »

SYNOPSIS:
The documentary chronicles the methods of work in relation to pre-Columbian man and the current farmer. From the character of Don Marcos Olaya, one of the last craftsmen elaborated the salt as did the ancient Chibcha (pre-Columbian techniques saturation and evaporation of this precious product), we know the mystification of ancient work and how to disappear , men feel that they too are devoted to the same tragic end. This old craftsman identifies his work with his life.Read More »

Quote:
The Spirit of Navajos
Here the daughters of the chapter chairman of the community decided to make a film showing “the old ways.” They chose their grandfather as subject. He was one of the best known “singers” (medicine men) in the area. The film opens with the old medicine man walking and wandering across the Navajo landscape, again digging and searching for roots and herbs which he is to use as part of a ceremony. We see him at one of the “camps” before a ceremony, eating and drinking. The sequence of the grandfather eating is the only one in which a face close-up is shown. It is apparent, however, that the shot was considered a humorous one, almost like a home movie in which one of the children sticks his tongue out at the camera.Read More »

Jerry falls in love with a stripper he meets at a carnival. Little does he know that she is the sister of a gypsy fortune teller whose predictions he had scoffed at earlier. The gypsy turns him into a zombie and he goes on a killing spree.Read More »

The life and love of Anton P. Chekhov at the crucial point when Чайка (Seagull) is to be premiered in St. Petersburg. The French and sometimes Russian title points the relation with Lika Mizinova, inspiration for the main character of the play.Read More »