1980s

The ghost of a murdered woman possesses a dancer’s body in order to exact vengeance on her killer.

Light Industry wrote:
A rarity unearthed from Harvard’s vaults, Fred Tan’s Split of the Spirit is a macabre tale of supernatural possession, necromantic battles, and the vengeful phantom of a woman scorned. In Tan’s stylish neo-noir thriller, a renowned female choreographer becomes overtaken by the specter of a murdered woman, who forces her to enact revenge upon the men who have wronged her. After a string of gruesome slayings, the film culminates in a searing conflagration, an allegorical avant-garde dance finale, and ultimately an Orphic journey to the afterworld and back. Tan worked as an assistant director to King Hu and made only three features before his death at age thirty-five; placing the forces of ancient sorcery in contemporary Taiwan and Hong Kong, he deploys an ominous synth soundtrack and an expressive, haunting mise-en-scène to bring primeval frights into the modern world.Read More »

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“Valmont,” Milos Forman’s spin on “Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” is sumptuous suds, a broadly played trivialization of de Laclos’s 18th-century novel of boudoir intrigue. With its callow cast and playful tone, there is nothing dangerous about Forman’s variation on the novelist’s schemes. It’s a naughty costume dramedy in which the erotic conquests of bored libertines are transformed into children’s kissing games.

Colin Firth and Annette Bening play the story’s sexual strategists, the smarmy Vicomte de Valmont and the devious Marquise de Merteuil, whose machinations sully the virtuous Madame de Tourvel (Meg Tilly) and the virginal Cecile de Volanges (Fairuza Balk). A generation younger than the cast of Stephen Frears’s “Dangerous Liaisons,” the actors’ ages more closely mirror those of the novel’s young adults and teenagers, but they seem less bedroom Machiavellians than members of a 1700s Breakfast Club, not tragically flawed, hopelessly jaded, ultimately doomed and self-destructive, just wet behind the leers.Read More »

Τεριρέμ
The mute wife (Olia Lazaridou) of a shadow-theater player (Antonis Kafetzopoulos) is suffering from cancer. An old woman, guided by her visions, discovers a Byzantine religious icon buried in a field. Her nephew sells the find to a thief, who then murders the old woman, without knowing that she had told the village priest about the holy icon she found. Two priests arrive in the village together with the puppeteer and his ailing wife, and there the wife sees a vision of the icon and where it was located in the field, which leads to the discovery of the bones of a saint. The wife sleeps on the spot where the holy relics were discovered and, upon awaking the following morning, regains her speech. Read More »

Description:
This Low Budget neo-noir crime thriller involves Johnny, a hitman (Brad Rijn), whose contract hit on a gangland rival is witnessed by a three year old boy, playing in his backyard. Johnny’s initial motivation to “eliminate” the one witness to the crime (under orders of his mob boss) becomes conflicted by his growing romantic involvement with the boy’s mother, Sally (Anne Carlisle).Read More »

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The Executioner’s Song is one of the best films about crime and punishment ever made. Far from being lurid or simpleminded, it paints a stark picture of how it must have been to live around Gilmore during that time. It doesn’t glamorize him or turn him into a cardboard villain, but instead depicts him as a man whose inability to handle his growing rage and alienation led him to destroy his life and the lives of those around him. It’s smart enough to know that there can never be a definitive answer as to why someone would commit murder, but that it’s also important to try to understand those reasons nonetheless. It’s also a vital film whatever your views on the issue of capital punishment, as it renders many clichés on the subject useless (and predates the more acclaimed Dead Man Walking by a good thirteen years). Add one of the finest performances of Tommy Lee Jones’ career, and The Executioner’s Song is highly recommended for anyone interested in a thoughtful crime drama.Read More »

A 1982 courtroom drama film which tells the story of a down-on-his-luck alcoholic lawyer who pushes a medical malpractice case in order to improve his own situation, but discovers along the way that he is doing the right thing. Since the lawsuit involves a woman in a persistent vegetative state, the movie is cast in the shadow of the Karen Ann Quinlan case. The movie stars Paul Newman, Charlotte Rampling, Jack Warden, James Mason, Milo O’Shea, and Lindsay Crouse.
Directed by Sidney Lumet, the film was adapted by David Mamet from the novel by Barry Reed and is not a remake of the 1946 film of the same name.
The Verdict garnered critical acclaim and box office success. The film was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Actor in a Leading Role (Paul Newman), Best Actor in a Supporting Role (James Mason), Best Director (Sidney Lumet), Best Picture and Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium (David Mamet).Read More »

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Motherland Hotel (Anayurt Oteli) is a 1986 Turkish film directed by Ömer Kavur. It is an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Yusuf Atılgan.

Zebercet owns a hotel in a small provincial town. He manages to keep it up with the help of one maid, a little girl who lives with him. One evening, one of the clients leaves the hotel, promising to return in a week. Haunted by the memory of the beautiful unknown, it leaves little to be gained by a little melancholy. Overwhelmed by his impulses, he refuses to take any clients, and closes the hotel.Read More »

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The director Gaspard Bazin is preparing a new feature film. For now, he is still in the casting and financing stages. He’s asking the help of Jean Almereyda, a producer once fashionable but now at low ebb, who has more and more difficulties to raise cash for his company. His wife, Eurydice, dreams of being a movie star. Between the two men, a perverse game is starting, Almereyda wishing to please his wife, but the unrepentant seducer reputation of Bazin holds him to require a part for Eurydice…Read More »

In the bleak days of 1983, the Crimson Permanent Assurance, an accountancy staffed by elderly workers much like a slave ship, has been taken over by efficiency-minded corporate types. When they sack an employee, there’s an uprising, and the building is unleashed from its moorings to sail across the (dry) ocean and take on the financial centers of the world, starting with an all-out attack on the large skyscraper housing The Very Big Corporation of America, complete with filing-cabinet cannons, ceiling-fan broadswords, and paper-spindle short-swords.Read More »