1980s

Synopsis:
Teens in a Turkish prison struggle to survive under hideous conditions. Made by dying Yilmaz Guney in France, after he escaped from a Turkish prison, enabling him to accept his award at Cannes for Yol (The Road). When the Turkish superstar leading man turned human rights activist, Guney was convicted for pro-Kurdish political activity and murder, by the Turkish military regime. Director/writer Guney’s last film, Duvar (The Wall), was banned in Turkey for 17 years. The incarcerated teens organize and fight back, brutalize each other, exult over the smallest triumph, while joking, suffering and learning from the inhumanity they wallow in. The prison also separately houses men and women, many played by other Turkish expatriates.Read More »

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This is the film that left the strongest impression on me. I have been lucky to engage it 3 times on 35mm.

Mani Kaul’s films create a sensory construct around their use of a selection of sounds to create a specific sensorial effect and images to create volume instead of (as in Hollywood) their denotative element of space. His films usually attempt to create an aesthetic where language is used beyond its denotative aspect, into its suggestive and rhythmic tonalities based on Anandvardhan’s 4th century text Dhwanyaloka about haiku like poetry forms and the aesthetic of suggestion they create known as ‘Dhwani’ which means ‘suggestive sound.’Read More »

synopsis
Dorothee, a would-be writer and journalist, leaves Germany for the Oz of San Francisco, searching for her long-lost mother and a cure for the malady of love. Installed in the Tenderloin, she peeps in on neighbors’ bizarre sex rituals as well as does sightseeing of the more traditional kind. But encounters with male impersonator Ramona, charming Hungarian bohemian Dominique, and Susie Sexpert, barker for an all-girl strip show, lead to exploratory adventures of self-discovery and fun. When Dorothy surfaces like a dazzled tourist on the wilder shores of the city’s lesbian community, she has discovered her true sexuality. . . . and left some illusions behind.Read More »

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Celebrated Mainland filmmaker Zhang Yimou brings his inimitable touch to Red Sorghum, a sumptuous drama set during 1930s China, just prior to the Japanese occupation. Jiu’er (Gong Li) is a young bride arranged to marry the leprous owner of a sorghum winery. But the leper dies, and Jiu’er takes over the winery, along with her lover (Jiang Wen), a burly rogue with a natural, rough charisma. Their rural lives are filled with struggle and even joy, but the invasion of the Japanese brings tragedy and blood to their doorsteps. Told in glorious shades of red, Red Sorghum is quintessential Zhang Yimou, and uses setting, cinematography, and stunning imagery to create characters and mood that are both iconic and recognizable. Gong Li and Jiang Wen both turn in revelatory performances. As both an anti-war film and a portrait of pre-Communist Chinese life, Red Sorghum is a compelling, powerful achievement from a true master of cinema.Read More »

Ettore Scola’s dark, romantic tale of a woman so stubborn and passionate that nothing can dissuade her from pursuing the object of her affections.

When Captain Bachetti arrives at his new post in Northern Italy, he already resents the reassignment, which has separated him from his mistress, the exquisite Clara. And the situation becomes even more disturbing when this man with a taste for beautiful women finds himself subjected to the persistent attentions of the spectacularly ugly Fosca; everything about this brash, loud, impolite and unattractive creature fills him with horror.
But the Captain has never before encountered the transformative power of love.Read More »

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Worthy of the director of “French Connection,” the pace of this set- in-LA action thriller immediately draws the view in and never lets up. A car chase in the best traditions of “Bullitt” and of Friedkin’s own “French Connection” is centers the action, but the motivation of a rogue agent obsessed with the death of his partner, and clearly with his own death, are well- and credibly- drawn. The most sympathetic character in the story is not one of the principals. It is a female informer. An ex-con at the mercy of those on both sides of the law, she is callously exploited by all. Her feelings for Agent Chance are more implied than explicit, but they are believable as is his indifference to her as a person. This riveting film never lets your attention wander. Thanks to Friedkin, we are told, we are given a credible ending to this taut, tightly- wound thriller. An under-exposed, under-appreciated work; excellent for the genre.Read More »

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Sara Driver’s first feature–a luminous, oddball comic fantasy about ancient Chinese curses and Xerox machines, set in Manhattan’s Chinatown and its immediate environs–may well be the most visually ravishing American independent film of its year (1986). Set in an irrational, poetic universe that bears a certain relationship to Jacques Rivette’s Duelle, this dreamy intrigue breaks a cardinal rule of fantasy by striking off in a number of directions: an executive barks in the street, a young Frenchwoman (Ann Magnuson) loses her hair, and machines in a copy shop start to purr and wheeze on their own initiative.Read More »

PLOT:
This family drama by Monicelli features an impressive international cast: Liv Ullmann, Catherine Deneuve, Philippe Noiret, Stefania Sandrelli and Bernard Blier, and it won a series of prestigeous film awards upon its release. It is a less comedic film, than most of Monicelli’s oeuvre up to this point, although the folly of the Italian male is still a central theme, as it had been in so many of his films from the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s.
In this case, a group of several generations of women are pulled together, when an accident strikes the padre familias (Noiret) that they all in various ways are, or have been, involved with. Thus, the second half of the film focusses on this group of very different women, and how they manage to relate to each other and get along, when they are faced with a series of serious challenges.Read More »

This is an adaptation of one of the most important novels of Argentine literary modernism, Roberto Arlt’s El juguete rabioso (1926). Similar in many ways to Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1917), this novel (and the film) chronicles a young man’s journey through a life of poverty on the margins of society in Buenos Aires among anarchists and gangsters during the first years of the 20th century. The novel is essential reading for an understanding of subsequent Argentine literature, yet it is little known outside of Argentina. In El beso de la mujer araña AKA Kiss of the Spider Woman (1976), Manuel Puig was very consciously drawing the whole conceit of the homosexual ‘traitor’/’lover’ and the political prisoner directly from this book.
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