1980s

Quote:
Gérard Depardieu and Wojciech Pszoniak star in Andrzej Wajda’s powerful, intimate depiction of the ideological clash between the earthy, man-of-the-people Georges Danton and icy Jacobin extremist Maximilien Robespierre, both key figures of the French Revolution. By drawing parallels to Polish “solidarity,” a movement that was being quashed by the government as the film went into production, Wajda drags history into the present. Meticulous and fiery, Danton has been hailed as one of the greatest films ever made about the Terror.Read More »

Fisher, an ex-cop, returns to his old beat somewhere in northern Europe after a thirteen-year hiatus in Cairo. His former mentor and role model, author of a treatise called “The Element of Crime”, asks him to solve a series of murders involving lottery ticket sellers. Guided by the theories put forth in the book, Fischer retraces the steps of a suspect, Harry Grey, as recorded in a three-year-old police surveillance report.Read More »

Plot Summary :
During the shooting of Andrei Tarkovsky’s last film Offret, cameraman Arne Carlsson taped around 50 hours of behind the scenes footage. Editor Michal Leszczylowski took the material and added scenes of previous interviews and interesting statements from the script of Offret and from Tarkovsky’s book ‘Sculpting in Time’. The result is a documentary that shows the way Tarkovksy worked: carefully building each scene. Shows why he did the things he did: his vision on film. And shows the emotion of the man Tarkovsky: his great disappointment when the camera breaks while shooting the house going up in flames.Read More »

A lavish two-part costume tragedy based on the classic The Dowerless Girl by the nineteenth-century playwright Alexander Ostrovsky, A Cruel Romance (also known as Ruthless Romance) was the biggest Soviet box-office hit of 1984, though it seems to have had little international exposure until now.

It marked a change of direction for the veteran Eldar Ryazanov, who up to then had tended to specialise in contemporary comedy, though it seems to have done his career little harm: he was made a People’s Artist of the Soviet Union that year – and no wonder, quite apart from the film’s commercial success, its mostly wart-ridden portrait of the venal, money-grubbing bourgeoisie of the then-discredited Tsarist era must have gone down a storm with the Soviet authorities.Read More »

Lynne and her friend John shot this film with a Regular 8 camera on a roof in San Francisco, literally creating a “drawn and quartered” image. Mostly, they each exist in their own private domains, separated by the barrier of the film frame. Sometimes, however, one person dares to intrude upon the pictorial space of the other.Read More »

SYNOPSIS:
William Klein goes on the hunt for Little Richard, the legendary “Architect of Rock and Roll”, who quit show business in 1957 at the height of his fame to become an evangelist. Richard was then lured back to secular music in the 1960s and 70s, but the excesses of stardom led him to a second retreat from the stage. For years he struggled to reconcile his religious calling with his flamboyant rock-and-roll persona, and at the time of filming, Klein finds Little Richard selling “Black Heritage Bibles” for a Nashville couple. Sensing that his image is being exploited, Richard quits his sales position and deserts the film. But Klein turns this into an opportunity to reconstruct Richard’s personality through the words of his family and friends in his native Macon, Georgia, and to celebrate his status as a cultural icon by filming scores of Little Richard impersonators and adoring fans in Hollywood.Read More »

AMG: Shanghai Blues combines romantic comedy, slapstick, music, and several classic coincidences (a favorite ploy of director and writer Tsui Hark to tell the story of a man (Kenny Bee) and a female dancer (Sylvia Chang) who meet under a Shanghai bridge in 1937 as they seek shelter from the Japanese bombing of the city. They are immediately drawn to each other and make a pact to meet under the bridge again when the war has ended. But their plans are thwarted and ten years later, the man gets an apartment in Shanghai (where he works as a musician, songwriter, and clown) unaware that the dancer — for whom he has been searching — is his downstairs neighbor. Meanwhile, a young, bubbly woman makes friends with the dancer at the club where she performs and inadvertently causes a considerable mix-up that at first looks fated to keep the star-crossed lovers apart.Read More »

Alan Bleasdale’s five-part series spin-off of the 1980 TV play The Black Stuff relates the further experiences of unemployed Liverpudlian tarmac layers Dixie, Chrissie, Loggo and Yosser, and their revered older friend, retired longshoreman and union leader, George Malone. As they struggle to make ends meet in a depressed economy, and to hold together their financially battered families, they are harassed by the petty bureaucrats of the DHSS. But the lumbering investigational juggernaut is, both comically and tragically, guided by drivers with only a provisional license.Read More »

Quote:
A magnate and his younger wife hire David to teach guitar to their teenage daughter. The wife quickly seduces David, and simultaneously he strikes up an acquaintance with the family’s inquisitive neighbor. One night, David is mugged but rescued from injury by a stranger, Daniel, who also becomes David’s friend and admits to being a hit man. Video tapes of their activities appear in the lovers’ mail; David thinks they’re from the neighbor, Daniel is sure the husband is onto the affair and hired the mugger. After Daniel tells David that he’s been hired to kill the husband, an elaborate manipulation plays out, with murder, suicide, a payoff, more videos, and a surprise pairing.Read More »