1990s

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This Senegalese melodrama tells the story of a young girl called Mossane who lives in a village between the ocean and the savannah. There, veneration for the traditions is very common. There’s a legend saying that every other century a girl is born who is doomed because of her beauty. Mossane is only fourteen years old but is already considered to be extraordinary beautiful. Even her own brother is in love with her. According to the custom she has been promised to a rather wealthy man called Diogoye since the day of her birth. However, Mossane is in love with the poor student Fara who is forced to return to the village while the university is on strike. Torn between her own dreams and traditions, Mossane decides to escape. The film shows the resistance of the young generation and is dedicated especially to the African women, their courage and their wish for emancipation.Read More »

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Things in Portugal weren’t what they are now. The story of this film is the story of bygone days when Portugal was hidden away from the rest of the world, when men were obliged to go to countries many Portuguese people could not point out on the map.
Men died and changed in these lands. Alex was only 10 years old, but he remembers, so its better for him to tell the story.Read More »

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It seems the lives of writers are hot movie properties these days. First Barton Fink, then Naked Lunch, and now Kafka. Whoever could have imagined such a thing? After the meteoric commercial success of Soderbergh’s debut feature sex, lies, and videotape, the director chose for his second effort this hypothetical presentation of the life of Franz Kafka. The movie is not so much a biography but rather, a speculative depiction of Kafka’s daily circumstances. While not untrue to the specific facts of Kafka’s life, the movie focuses more on the environment of 1919 Prague that so influenced the author. In large part, the things at which the movie excels are precisely the things that also make Kafka’s work so enduringly vivid — the absurdity anchored by an exacting realism, the incomprehensibility coupled with utmost lucidity, the looming sense of paradox, futility, labyrinthine logic and impenetrable pressures.Read More »

“Liv Ullmann’s directorial debut is a beguiling and bittersweet tale about the yearning to be free… “

Synopsis:
Copenhagen at the end of the nineteenth century. Sofie is a beautiful and cultured 28-year-old who lives at home with her parents Frederikke and Semmy. They only want the best for her and worry that she will end up an old maid like her three aunts with whom they share the weekly Sabbath meal…Read More »

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Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk was the first President of Czechoslovakia (1918-1935), independence movement leader and philosopher. After the Velvet Revolution, Chytilová turns to Masaryk to ensure some continuity between her country’s past and present.Read More »

Plot: Prompted by the death of his father and the grief of his mother, a man recalls the story of how they met in flashback.Read More »

The second film to be made from Woody Allen’s successful stage comedy (following a 1969 feature starring Jackie Gleason), Don’t Drink the Water is a made-for-television adaptation directed by and starring Allen himself. The fish-out-of-water premise remains the same: Allen plays Walter Hollander, a caterer from New Jersey who takes his family on vacation to a fictional Eastern European country. The trip turns sour when, thanks to a series of misunderstandings involving some inopportune snapshots, they are accused of espionage. The family goes on the run, taking refuge in the American Embassy. There, with the help of a wily young diplomat, they try to figure out a way to return to America without sparking an international incident. Though this version is set 25 years later than the original film, the changes are mostly cosmetic: the visual style is hand-held and more frantic, and the script replaces numerous references to the Cold War with a few glancing nods to present-day politics. Another notable change, the addition of an opening montage parodying newsreels, was reportedly the result of network pressure after Allen’s initial cut proved too short for the planned time slot.Read More »

A love story between a girl who loves reading books, and a boy who has previously checked out all of the library books she chooses.Read More »

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In 1956, there was an uprising of Hungarians against their Russian overlords, which the Russians briefly allowed to flower and then ruthlessly suppressed. One suspects that the country’s rulers knew about the uprising in advance and permitted it to continue so as to be able to identify who was most actively involved. In this film, it is 1958, and five very different men are waiting in their prison cells to be taken out and executed. Their dreams, fantasies and recollection relieve what might otherwise seem to be an unnecessarily repetitive situation. The internationally known French star Matthieu Carrière plays one of the condemned men. ~ Clarke Fountain, RoviRead More »