Quote:
Carefully observed and beautifully shot, the film that launched American Zoetrope 40 years ago is an early herald of Coppola’s talent for crafting delicate narratives that actors can sink their teeth into. Natalie (Shirley Knight) is a Long Island housewife trapped in a loveless marriage and stifled by domesticity. Two months pregnant and unable to bear her humdrum existence, she hits the road on a quest for freedom that Roger Ebert dubbed the “mirror image” of Easy Rider.Read More »
Quote:
Jakubiskos debut, by many considered his best movie. The title can be translated as “The Crucial Years”, but literally it is “The Christ Years”, based on the idiomatic notion that a man should accomplish something in life before he reaches the age of Jesus when he was crucified. The film surely has some autobiographical elements, as it is about a beginning artist from Eastern Slovakia who lives and works in Prague.Read More »
Quote:
A clinically presented series of stark white, unembellished placards illustrates the sobering statistical data for the overwhelming public sentiment against the abolition of the death penalty as an off-screen narrator (Nagisa Oshima) provides a snide, but impassioned rebuttal to popular opinion by presenting a objective documentary of the austere and impersonal milieu associated with the methodical process of carrying out a state execution through the specific example of the appointed hanging of a convicted rapist and murderer known only as ‘R’ (Do-yun Yu): an empty, minimalist sitting room that provides an illusive, parting glimpse of a semblance of home for the condemned prisoner as he makes his way into the execution room, an assembly of unnamed official guests waiting in a segregated viewing room to witness the macabre ceremony, a procedural rehearsal of the chamber’s fail-safe sequence as the prisoner is blindfold and fitted with a noose, the actuation of trap door, the median measured time of 18 minutes before the heart completely stops and a staff physician (Rokko Toura) is able to record the official time of death. Read More »
Lost in the Desert, initially released as Dirkie, is a South African film from 1969/1970, written, produced and directed by Jamie Uys under the name of Jamie Hayes.
Uys himself plays Anton De Vries, a concert pianist whose 8-year-old son Dirkie is the central character. Dirkie is played by Uys’s real-life son Wynand Uys, credited as Dirkie Hayes.Read More »
A eight-part animatied portrait of various species, accompanied by a different style of music – the various parts are: Aquatilia (foxtrot), Hexapoda (bolero), Pisces (blues), Reptilia (tarantella), Aves (tango), Mammalia (minuet), Simiae (polka) and Homo (waltz). Each animation mixes drawings, pictures, real animals and animated skeletonsRead More »
Frank visits his friend Josef, who introduces him to his pedigree rabbits and his wife Mary. Frank is more interested in the slightly unsettling fact that Josef and Mary’s garden fence is entirely made up of living people holding hands. Finally, Frank asks Josef how he manages to keep the fence together… Read More »
A man, apparently on the run, takes shelter in a dilapidated house. Every day, he drills a hole through a wall and looks into one of the rooms, each time seeing a different surreal vision… Read More »
Take a deep breath, meditate for a few moments to cleanse the mind, make sure there are no sharp objects in the room, strap on a seat belt, and carefully enter the world of Too Much Too Often, yet another slice of unintentional surrealism from The First Lady of Sexploitation, director/producer DORIS WISHMAN (here billed under the name of her then-husband, Louis Silverman). But beware: your mind may never be the same…Read More »
Quote:
Boy and Bicycle is the first film made by Ridley Scott. The black and white short was made on 16mm film while Scott was a photography student at the Royal College of Art in London in 1962.
Although a very early work – Scott would not direct his first feature for another 15 years – the film is significant in that it features a number of visual elements that would be become motiffs of Scotts work. The film features the cooling towers of the Imperial Chemical Industries works at Billingham, foreshadowing images in Alien, Blade Runner and Black Rain. The central element of the Boy and the Bicycle is re-used in Scott’s advert for Hovis of the early 1970s. The film features Scott’s younger brother Tony Scott as the boy.Read More »