Portrait of a real-life swindler — played by himself! Von Bagh’s feature debut: a weird ‘n’ wild mix of fact and fiction, documentary scenes and exuberant reconstructions of purportedly true-life events, full of lewd humor and driven by a good-natured humanism. A true discoveryRead More »
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Yanagimachi’s first feature film is about a young man who makes a map of a neighborhood in which he delivers newspapers. He keeps a dossier on each family, recording their habits and rating how much he dislikes them. One family, for example, gets an X because their dog barks all the time. Another man gets an X because he refuses to pay his bill. What turns all this scary is that the young man declares “I’m a right-winger!” and starts ruthlessly calling in bomb threats on these families. He psychologically abuses the crippled mistress of his roommate until she is driven to the brink of suicide. Rather than coming up with pat explanations for such anti-social behavior, Yanagimachi only describes the actions and lets the viewer decide why these things are happening. Questions of personal responsibility versus societal influences are completely left to the viewer to sort out.Read More »
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Kyz-Zhibek – Kazakh poetic folk legend of the 16th century, tells about the period in the Kazakh nation when the people suffered from bloody feuds. In those times each province of the Kazakh nation had its own Khan and each tried to supersede the other. The love story of Tolegen, the brave warrior, and the beauty Zhibek ends tragically because of inter-family strife. Tolegen is foully murdered by Bekejan (the batyr, or nobleman, of the rival family), who earlier strived for the hand of Zhibek. Zhibek commits suicide after learning about the death of Tolegen.
16 variants of the legend exist in different parts of Kazakhstan.
In 1934 opera “Kyz-Zhibek” was staged in Abay Opera House (music – Eugeny Brusilovsky, libretto – Gabit Musrepov).
In 1970 Kazakhfilm made film based on the legend.
In 1988 the poem was translated into Russian by Kazakh poet Bakhytzhan Kanapyanov.Read More »
SYNOPSIS
From the back of the case:
A desolate bus-stop on a highway… figure of a village woman – Balo, waiting to deliver a meal to Sucha Singh, the husband, a bus driver. He expects the traditional duties of an average Indian rural wife. Balo in turn accepts her husband’s independent lifestyle. Balo hurries to the bus-stop. She is late delivering the meal, trying to save her younger sister, Jinda, from being seduced by the village rake.Read More »
Penny Patterson, an American psychology student, began an experiment in primate communication in the early 1970s using a young zoo gorilla named Koko, who was loaned to Penny for the experiment. Due to a philosophical predisposition to consider that “humanizing” animals is wrong, and alarmed at the increasing publicity over the experiments, the zoo took back the gorilla, which by then had learned over three hundred signs and showed, to many observers, an almost human comprehension of her condition. This French documentary explores the experiments, the circumstances of Koko’s being withdrawn from them, and the question of the gorilla’s “civil rights,” if any.
– All Movie GuideRead More »
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Sado is a third base man in a high school baseball team. He has a friend, Shinbunbu, who is an editor for the school newspaper. As a plan to make money, the two one day decide to become pimp and prostitute. However, after killing a gangster in a conflict, Sado gets caught and ends up in juvenile delinquent hell.
The movie was targeted for a high school audience with what would have been an outrageous adventure for a high school student for that time in Japan. Such occurrence is no longer novel in Japan today where high school girls become their own pimps, but back in 1978 the theme of the movie was quite shocking and sensational.Read More »
An artist slowly goes insane while struggling to pay his bills, work on his paintings, and care for his two female roommates, which leads him taking to the streets of New York after dark and randomly killing derelicts with a power drill.Read More »
After 25 years of married life, Julien and Clemence Bouin have ended up hating each other. Living in a dilapidated house soon to be demolished, their lives are filled with bitterness and regret for the happy past both have lost. When Julien adopts a stray cat and smothers it with affection, Clemence’s suppressed resentment turns to hatred…Read More »
Repertory consists of one continuous tracking shot, during which the camera completely circles the outside of a locked and empty theatre, whilst a voice describes a three week programme of daily ‘imagined presentations’ inside the theatre. The contrast between the documentary image and fictional narrative is exaggerated by the nature of the descriptions, which are wittily absurd and fantastic – the presentations include a domestic interior covered in melting slabs of butter; an old aeroplane, an illuminated fish tank, etc. Extrapolated partly from Breakwell’s frequent visits to Nottingham Playhouse in the late 1950s, the film plays out with peculiar effectiveness his interest in the relationship between words and pictures.Read More »