Paul Kersey thought his days as a vigilante were long behind him. But when his daughter and housekeeper are savagely assaulted and murdered, Paul is forced to take the law back into his own hands, hitting the tough, gang-filled streets of Los Angeles and embarking on a violent quest for justice. Realizing he has a ruthless vigilante on his hands, Detective Frank Ochoa races to put an end to the building carnage.Read More »
Grant Nebel wrote:
Melancholic Screwball
Into the Night resembles a lot of other films of its time: the Los Angeles version of Scorsese’s After Hours or what Miracle Mile would have been if that thing (you know the thing I mean) hadn’t happened. Moving forward, it’s Collateral with one character gender-switched and actually more gunplay, but its most interesting cinematic relative is Eyes Wide Shut. Let’s call it a second cousin: both films are about a man’s two-night journey after he realizes his wife’s infidelity (imagined in Eyes, real here) and more importantly, both take place in a city that’s not quite real. Kubrick created his own hallucination of New York for his film, but director John Landis and writer Ron Koslow had the advantage of making Into the Night in L. A., a city that’s always already part fiction.Read More »
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THE KNIGHT (RYCERZ), 1980. Poland.
With Piotr Skarga, Daniel Olbrychski. A haunting, austere ballad about a knight’s quest for a gold-stringed harp whose sound is said to bring peace and harmony. The film’s imagery is inspired by medieval icons. 81 min.
New York Film Festival
London Film Festival
Los Angeles Film FestivalRead More »
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Miloud is a barber in Darb el-Soltane, an old proletarian neighborhood in Casablanca, who struggles to maintain a semblance of dignity. Life has dealt his friend Hmida hard knocks. A countryside boy who moved to the city after his father repudiated him, he turned to petty larceny to survive, for which he served a sentence in prison. Hmida is jobless yet boisterous, while Miloud is skittish and disheartened by his friend’s objectionable activities. When a wealthy entrepreneur who wields power in the neighborhood manages to evict the barber and his wife from the shop to build a centre for Koranic instruction, Hmida incites his friend to fight back. Deemed one of Moroccan cinema’s underrated masterpieces, Hallaq Darb al-Fuqara’ is infused with disarming realist grit. Adapted from a play by Youssef Fadel, a celebrated playwright, novelist and screenwriter who hailed from Darb el-Soltane and was imprisoned for his play “The War”, the film was Mohamed Reggab’s only narrative feature. He incurred so much debt to finance the production that he even spent time in prison.Read More »
In the late 1930s, world politics begin to head in a dangerous direction. In Europe, Germany expands and rearms and proceeds to annex several border countries into the Reich. Meanwhile, Italy attempts to establish a Facist Colonial Empire under Mussolini while the Empire of Japan stands ready for a major war with China. Enter the Henry family, headed by career naval officer Victor “Pug” Henry. “Winds of War” thus follows the exploits of Pug and his children, all of which are set against the backdrop of world events leading up to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.Read More »
This little film was shot by Jean-Luc Godard in 1981 when he was visiting Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios in San Francisco, where Coppola was directing One from the Heart. It stars Andrei Konchalovsky reading a book about Cézanne, while a crew is trying to fix the light to film a painting by Georges de La Tour, Le Nouveau-né.
A few seconds of this film are included in Godard’s Les trois désastres.Read More »
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Our planet was contaminated by many nuclear explosions that left the soil and the air filled with radiation, and now the few survivors of those catastrophic events live under the ground on a shelter controlled by scientists. After an incident inside the shelter, a group of rebellious scientists defy their leadership when they find a good possibility of returning to the surface.Read More »
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The enigmatic but vivid imagery of this loosely plotted film is based on a similarly evocative novel by the Italian author Antonio Tabucchi, Noturno Indiano. An old friend of the hero’s has been living in Bombay with a prostitute. His friend Peter Schlemihl (Otto Tausig) is a concentration camp survivor, who went to India after being captivated by a photograph he saw there. When the prostitute writes to him in Europe asking that he rescue his friend from a mysterious malaise, he flies into India to try and help. When he gets to Bombay, he discovers that his friend has disappeared. Following the clues left behind by the friend, and based on his acquaintance with him, he journeys to Madras to speak to a Theosophist dignitary there, and then journeys on to Portugues Goa. With each step of his journey, the hero (Jean-Hugues Anglade) becomes more identified with his friend, and re-enacts in his own person the transformations he must have experienced. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie GuideRead More »
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Having gone through many personal struggles, Eli (Lil Terselius) returns to her native village and begins to work on the farm of Ingeborg Eriksdotter (Anita Bjork), eventually tending a plot that once belonged to her family. But Eli has been gone a long time, and the opaque villagers see her as an outsider — she is suspicious from the start. The year is 1625, and stories of witches conjuring up evil are a part of the daily culture. Eli unwittingly makes matters worse for herself when she is able to cure the sick with herbs, and when she begins an affair with Aslak (Bjoern Skagestad) a farmhand — clearly she must have cast a spell on him. This all adds up to a witch hunt with a ready-made “witch.” Eli, in the end, is officially accused of witchcraft by a devious bailiff, while Ingeborg makes every attempt to save her, and Aslak himself does not survive the stress — hardly a good omen for the outcome of the trial.Read More »