1970s

The lovely Maria Teresa is unhappily married with the impotent lawyer Marcello. Maria Teresa’s marriage is contrasted by the passionate Valeria, who is killed during a chase. Is Valeria’s husband the murderer? Maria Teresa helps him…Read More »

Plot Summary
The gunfighter El Topo (“The Mole”) and his young son ride through a desert to a village, whose inhabitants have been massacred. Bandits are nearby, torturing and killing the survivors. El Topo rescues a woman (Mara), who leads him on a mission to find and defeat the four master gunmen of the desert. Leaving his son with a group of monks, El Topo and Mara complete the mission, accompanied by a mysterious woman in black. The women leave El Topo wounded in the desert, where he is found by a clan of deformed people who take him to the remote cavern where they live.Read More »

Imagine, if you will, a story written for Akira Kurosawa. You know, one with armies clashing and sieges of great castles. Now imagine the story was done instead by a third-grade grammar-school class of about thirty people–the same heavy themes but where Kurosawa would show an army the play has to use two people. Instead of a castle there would be a tent. You would get a sort of “micro-epic.” Okay, now you have some idea what a “micro-epic” might be. Ousmane Sembene’s 1977 Senegalese film CEDDO is a very big film on a very small scale. The film, based on a true story, takes place in one village but it is still the stuff of epics.Read More »

In this 1972 actioner, a Washington DC cop is proud that he is one of the few African Americans on the force. He is not well loved by his peers or the street people. The trouble erupts when he is overlooked for a promotion. The angered cop goes off the deep end and begins using his gun to launch a personal vendetta against street crime. In the end it is all for naught and he does not survive the adventure.Read More »

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The time is the seventeenth century. The beggar Maryna Schuchová hides the Host in her scarf at the Communion. She admits to the parish priest Schmidt that she intended to give it to the midwife Groerová to heal her ailing cow. The young priest declares her a witch and convinces the Sumperk countess De Galle to summon the inquisitor Boblig from Edelstadt. This failed student of law sees the offer as a great opportunity. He uses torture and threats to force the women from the to testify to their meetings with the devil and learn by heart the lies he has made up for the inquisition tribunal. Boblig accuses the wealthy burghers of witchcraft as well, and so wants to seize their possessions.Read More »

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Aravindan’s finest b&w film chronicles three days with a circus in a small town in Kerala. A series of high-angle shots, as the circus drives into its new location, introduce us to the village. Several sequences use a remarkable quasi-documentary effect combined with minutely choreographed action e.g. the sunset as the manager (Gopi) directs the raising of the big top. The episodic film tells of a soldier who befriends the circus strong man in a toddy bar and shows how the bizarre characters from the circus including the dwarf merge with the local populace.Read More »

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In a small town outside of Barcelona, Spain, José Maria is a teenager with a big problem, he imagines that he is really a woman. While he begins to show his desire to be a woman through his appearance, the reactions within his household make things more difficult for him. His rude father is a male chauvinist who, afraid of his son’s softness, puts him to work chopping wood. Then, his father takes him to a cabaret show, to expose José Maria to women. However at a show, José Maria is exposed to a dancer named Bibi, who is a transgender woman, for the first time.Read More »

Antoine Chapelot, a bachelor in his forties, works in a hardware shop and lives with his mother. Everything changes when he meets Caroline, a teenaged charmer who unwittingly helps him to organize a lucrative real estate scam. While he is on a roll, Antoine decides to pursue the career of a swindler a bit further by persuading a rich family that they had a long-lost American uncle who has just died a millionaire.

Like Deville’s best films, this has an eccentric relationship at the heart of the plot, vertiginous cutting and a dance-like fluidity of texture.Read More »

Quote:
The name Tale of Tales came from a poem of the same name by Turkish poet Nazım Hikmet that Norshteyn loved since 1962.Read More »