1970s

The wives of three wealthy men are kidnapped and held for a $3 million ransom, but one of the men doesn’t want to pay his share.Read More »

Rebellious young Werther is passionately, but hopelessly, in love with Lotte. Although he knows that she is married to somebody who can offer her a secure future, Werther tries to be near her. Lotte cannot decide between these two men. She eventually rejects Werther, who does not survive her decision. Based on the novel by Goethe. Director Egon Günther and set designer Helga Schütz make cameo appearances.
—DEFA Film LibraryRead More »

PLOT
An aging rail worker, living a mononously quiet life with his wife, is asked to retire. The second of the two austere-looking, deliberately paced films Shaheed Saless made in Iran proved to be one of the turning points of Iranian cinema in the 70s.Winner of numerous prizes at the Berlin Film Festival in 1974, including the Silver Bear for Best Director, STILL LIFE examines the lot in life of an old man who guards a railroad crossing and his wife, who brings in a meager income weaving carpets. After 30 years in the same job, the man is forced into retirement by the arrival of the new guard. Finally, he is forced to a bleak epiphany of society’s indifference to his fate.Read More »

Paul Boyer (Gérard Blain), a jazz pianist in Paris, has lots of free time during the day, and spends it happily with his baby boy, Marc. But money is tight, and so, at his wife’s prompting, Paul takes a chance on running counterfeit dollars to New York for a big payoff. Caught at customs, he spends nine years in an American jail and returns home to find her remarried to a wealthy man and his own paternal rights revoked. The rest of the film—directed by Blain with the harrowing calm of an intimate confession—follows Paul in his obsessive, desperate, coldly calculated effort to see his son again. Though the story is part thriller, part family melodrama, part spiritual journey, part social drama, Blain purges it of all genre artifice: the purity of his method and his sentiments suggests the fresh, primal artistry of the early silent cinema. Released in 1973. In French. — Richard BrodyRead More »

Storyline
When Janet Furie’s scientist husband dies during an experiment gone wrong, she suspects that he was murdered by another scientist, Dr. Martin Becker. She hatches a clever revenge plan. By changing her looks and assuming a new identity, she insinuates herself into the life of Dr. Becker, all the while plotting to destroy his life and career. But is Dr. Becker really guilty?Read More »

Based on the young-adult novel by Alice Childress, this heartfelt social-issue drama follows the journey of Benjie (Larry B. Scott), a troubled teen growing up in South Central Los Angeles. Traumatized by his father’s desertion and unsettled by his mother’s (Cicely Tyson) relationship with a new boyfriend (Paul Winfield), Benjie begins experimenting with drugs—leading him down a dark path of heroin addiction. Now, Benjie’s family must navigate a host of challenges as they help him to overcome his dependency and get his life back on track.Read More »

Quote:
Four characters go through a series of deeply emotional, psychedelic, sensual, and sexual encounters, evoking the times and textures of the 1960s underground.Read More »

imdb wrote:
Dark, decadent, morbid, passionate – and 34 years later still the strangest memory regarding my very own personal history of watching movies since I was five years old. Despite the fact that this French/Italian production from the early seventies delivers incredibly strong performances by Helmut Berger at the peak of his career, the always excellent Francoise Fabian and the fabulous Paul Meurisse, that it shows you wonderfully filmed locations, and comes up with a solid script including a couple of interesting though perverted characters, the movie itself disappeared totally out of sight. Maybe you need to know Europe or even European or Italian movies to get along with it – I’m not sure about that. But I cannot understand why „Les Voraces” (German title „Die Gefraessigen”) fell into a black hole of total obscurity like hardly any other movie I’ve ever watched before and since.Read More »

From imdb:
This sequel to “Legend of N. Charley” is a step in the right direction for whoever decided to make a franchise out of character with such a tasteless name. Charley finds his legend has spread and he is now a well-known folk hero that children worship and fawn over. Film is tonally imbalanced in a 1970’s way that seems to straddle grim nihilism and do-gooder adventure simultaneously. Film seems firmly set in “PG” territory until a downer montage showing lots of characters’ bloody deaths pops up in the third act. Fred Williamson tries to express emotions such as laughter and sadness as opposed to just ‘looking bad and looking cool’ and the results are debatable at best. Still, Fred is a fine movie presence and it is his fans that will want to see this movie despite the low quality of the DVD.Read More »