1980s

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One of the highlights of this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival, it’s already apparent, is a retrospective of the work of Dominik Graf, a genre specialist mostly unknown outside his natve Germany, who has worked in both film and TV, specialising mainly in crime dramas. The program also includes other German crime TV shows selected by Graf to contextualise his work (including Sam Fuller’s Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street and uber-rare work by Czech emigre Zbynek Brynych, best known otherwise for The Fifth Horseman is Fear).Read More »

PLOT:
Vivian Stanshall’s priceless film of exquisite lunacy is is a work of absurd genius. The labyrinthine plot sees Sir Henry, a mad aristocratic war veteran, attempt to exorcise the trouserless ghost of his dead brother, Humbert, whom he accidentally killed in a drunken duck-shooting accident. This is aided, or hindered, by his mad family and servants including the tapeworm-obsessed Mrs. E; Old Scrotum; the eternally knitting Aunt Florrie; the Lady Philippa of Stains, a turkey-legged old soak. With German POW’s in the garden, a mechanical bulldog, a horse in the billiards room and a marriage bed furnished with a barbed-wire divide, the mayhem of Rawlinson End is endless…
-Vivian StanshallRead More »

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Following Punch and Judy from their malevolent medieval personas through their much-mollified assimilation into English folklore, this film finally restores the odd couple to their rightful roles as hair-raising anarchists. It is a stunning mixture of mime, mask, painting, crudely animated documents and mischievously reanimated newsreels, as well as the demonic atonalities of a modernist opera by Harrison Britwistle brought to “life” in a puppet fantasy/nightmare.Read More »

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The story deals with a young girl getting adopted by a family that holds her like a slave and then being “freed” by a young man working for this family´s company. 10 years later she gets involved in the murder of one of her step-sisters.Read More »

In Transylvania, in the 19th century, the village birthplace of a rich farmer’s son is undergoing a cholera epidemic when he returns from studying at a university, and bodies are being removed from houses. Once at home, he spies the beautiful daughter of a local forester. However, one of his father’s servants has also seen her, and they become rivals in love. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie GuideRead More »

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Rendez-vous begins with aspiring actress Nina (Binoche) fresh off the boat in Paris, where she immediately falls into bed with both real estate clerk Paulot (Wadeck Stanczak) and his in-your-face roommate Quentin (Lambert Wilson). Soon enough, secrecy is put aside and the whole affair becomes a messy conflagration of emotion and raw sexuality.Read More »

Plot from IMDB: The feared bandit Cobra Verde (Klaus Kinski) is hired by a plantation owner to supervise his slaves. After the owner suspects Cobra Verde of consorting with his young daughters, the owner wishes him gone. Rather than kill him,the owner sends Cobra Verde to Africa. The only white man in the area, Cobra Verde finds himself the victim of torture and humiliation. Later, he trains soldiers in a rebel army. Far from home, Cobra Verde is on the edge of madness.Read More »

Hermann is working as a delivery boy for a florist after school time. One day he is delivering a bouquet of flowers to Rosa Stern, a woman in the beginning of her 40’s who live behind heavy curtains in an apartment filled with a secretive atmosphere. In the coming weeks Hermann gets more bouquets to be delivered to Rosa. The visits with Rosa gets more and more important to him.Read More »

Considered to be one of the most powerful and emotional Greek movies, Rembetiko focuses on the life of an individual woman, a real person, and through her personal story, it retells the story of Greece, from 1920 to 1955: the national disaster in Minor Asia, the one million refugees who came to Greece, the World War II, the Nazi occupation, the Civil War, immigration. The revival of an era, the recall of lost ethics of the old time musicians, and all the elements of a popular music drama, compose this epic masterpiece, accompanied by the music and songs of Stavros Xarhakos (most of them with lyrics by Nikos Gkatsos).

A voyage to history of the first half of the 20th century, but also a voyage to the origins of rembetiko – a Greek form of urban blues performed in lowclass joints where the social misfits of the twenties known as “rembetes” gathered.Read More »