1980s

Quote:
Faceted, fragmented, and oneiric, Philippe Garrel’s Elle a passé tant d’heures sous les sunlights… (She Spent So Many Hours Under the Sun Lamps) is more exorcism than expurgation, elegy than lamentation – an abstract, yet lucid chronicle of love and loss, death and birth sublimated through textural, self-reflexive impressions, visceral gestures, and metaphoric tableaux. A profoundly personal film dedicated to the memory of friend and fellow filmmaker (and May 68 idealist) Jean Eustache, and haunted by the unreconciled specter of Garrel’s failed relationship with Nico, the film opens to a crepuscular image of a couple – perhaps an actor and his lover (Jacques Bonnaffé and Anne Wiazemsky) as apparent surrogates for Garrel and Nico – in the midst of a breakup on a public street on a cold, winter evening, as their seemingly tenuous reconciliation is truncated by the subsequent shot of the couple returning home, and an all too familiar rupture as she once again lapses into the desensitized haze of heroin addiction in the distraction of his preoccupying rehearsals.Read More »

A hitman approaches a writer to help him create his next best seller, but the violent world he was a part of has other plans.Read More »

Many people strive to make themselves rich and famous in Hong Kong, a small and crowded place. The drastic changes in Alan’s life and the stories happening to those ordinary people around him are all too vividly shown in this film.Read More »

From the DVD booklet:
Through fragments of Boris’s life and his son Matej, the film expresses the conflict of generations, the already existing gap because of their ideological coloring as well as their different opinions towards the capability of living, worthy of a human being. After several years spent in prison for political reasons, Boris comes back home. In his apartment, where after the divorce with his wife he lives alone, he finds that his son Matej moved in. His son is already an adult and he’s trying to make a living as a pop-musician. He sets up an improvised sound recording studio in his father’s apartment. Boris doesn’t like Matej’s life-style and his behavior toward his girlfriend and his other friends in general, as he find it a life without sense, without plans and ideals.Read More »

Quote:
“Welcome to Sparkle’s Tavern, a bizarre little hole-in-the-wall. In the Convenience Parlor in the back of the tavern are four more holes in the `Suck Stalls.’ When the chorus girls and headliner Sparkle aren’t singing and dancing, they’re servicing the leather-cowboy patrons. Buster, the proprietor (and Sparkle’s gay brother) runs around nervous all the time and occasionally helps out at the stalls: `All this [fluid] is going to give me the runs,’ he says at one point. These siblings are terrified that their fragile, obsessive-compulsive mother will one day discover her children’s secrets. When gang leader Jock `rapes’ Sparkle in his apartment already full of `whiskey-laden, naked’ bodies, his jealous, white-trash girlfriend, Brenda (comparable to actress Yvette Mimieux), spills the beans about Beth Sue (Sparkle) and her non-sensual, highly dramatic Mom. This info allows Jock to blackmail Buster and seize control of his tavern. Jock sends an invitation to Mrs. Blake for a free night at the tavern…Read More »

Plot Summary
Arnulf Kabe and his wife Andrea live in East Berlin. Arnulf has only one ambition in life: to be able to leave the East and live in the West. He hatches a plan to get himself arrested at a border crossing and is eventually bought out by the West Germans. He has reached his aim and is living in West Berlin now, he even has an affair with the attractive Veronika, but he can’t help missing his wife. And he finds a way to be able to return to the East: he will work as a spy for the East German state security. That way he’ll be able to cross the border any time and pay her a visit. Eventually, he even manages to bring his wife to the West on a borrowed passport. However, she finds it difficult adapt to life on the other side of the Wall.Read More »

A riotous late-Soviet-era animated musical about the agonies of modern family life in the 20th century, taking place on New Year’s Eve. A postcard that gets put into the wrong mailbox, and a misunderstood lipstick mark, cause a married couple to trade accusations of infidelity that threaten to derail their holiday.Read More »

Quote:
A beautifully observed, beautifully performed offbeat comedy.

Milkman Melvin Dummar (Le Mat) picks up a grouchy old hobo in the Nevada desert one night, lends him a quarter while disbelieving his claim to be Howard Hughes, and then returns to a mundane life of work, divorce, remarriage, and failed songwriting attempts, until eight years later he appears to have been left a fortune by the dead tycoon.Read More »

The apparent vertical scratch in celluloid that opens Presents literally opens into a film within the film. When its figure awakens into a woman in a ‘real’ unreal set, the slapstick satire of structural film begins. It is not the camera that moves, but the whole set, in this first of three material ‘investigations’ of camera movement. In the second, the camera literally invades the set; a plexiglass sheet in front of the dolly crushes everything in its sight as it zooms through space. Finally, this monster of formalism pushes through the wall of the set and the film cuts to a series of rapidly edited shots as the camera zigzags over lines of force and moving fields of vision in an approximation of the eye in nature. Snow pushes us into acceptance of present moments of vision, but the single drum beat that coincides with each edit in this elegaic section announces each moment of life’s irreversible disappearance.Read More »