Budapest in the thirties. The restaurant owner Laszlo hires the pianist András to play in his restaurant. Both men fall in love with the beautiful waitress Ilona who inspires András to his only composition. His song of Gloomy Sunday is, at first, loved and then feared, for its melancholic melody triggers off a chain of suicides. The fragile balance of the erotic ménage à trois is sent off kilter when the German Hans goes and falls in love with Ilona as well.Read More »
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Tough gangster Ryuichi and his ethnically Chinese gang make a play to take over the drug trade in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district by massacring the competition. He meets his match in Detective Jojima, who will do everything to stop them.Read More »
One of the several documentaries dedicated to the great master Sergei Paradjanov, died in 1990. On this occasion, who is behind the camera is the acclaimed director of Armenian origin Don Askarian. The film was produced in 1998 by Don Film in Co-Production with Margarita Woskanian and ZDF-ARTE.Read More »
Imdb review
Life is Precious, 21 August 2000
Author: Martin Kohler ([email protected]) from Pretoria, South Africa
Having known someone who needed a kidney transplant, I was aware of the tremendous difficulty in finding a tissue matched donor organ. This film, which is about a heart transplant, brings out the desperation of the patient for whom there is no longer any other treatment option very clearly and realistically.
What I had not considered, and what this film made me aware of, is the extremely difficult position that the relatives of a deceased person are put in when they are requested to give permission for an organ donation. At this point they are already suffering from the shock and grief of having lost someone they loved, and this additional burden can test the limits of what they can bear.Read More »
ANDRZEJ ZULAWSKI’S adaptation of Manuela Gretkowska’s provocative and hugely successful novel reaches new extremes in the depiction of brutality, sex, and passion as it tells the story of a young(ish) anthropologist driven by the mystery surrounding the death of a recently discovered shaman; and his growing obsession with an enigmatic yet violently perverse beauty known as “The Italian”.SZAMANKA (She-Shaman) is a film ‘without brakes’. Above all else, it is a ‘demonic’ film where characters are battlegrounds in the war between demons and angels, where angels are agents of God and demons are those of the Devil. This pulpy, sexually charged tale with its deranged erotic futurism underlines Zulawski’s commitment to stretch the limits of aesthetic expression by exploring themes beyond the pale in conventional cinema. Violence, exuberance and sexuality are its key ingredients. Through hysteria, possession and hallucination we see what the Polish writer Stanislaw Przybyszewski called ‘naked soul’. Read More »
road movie in which a racist skinhead is stuck in a car with a black guy
by german feminist film maker Helke Sander
“Schwarz, weiß, doof!” – Mit diesem Spruch sagt die vorlaute Göre Jenny, was sie von ihren beiden ungewollten Mitreisenden hält. Einer davon ist der Skinhead “Dazlak”. Jenny las ihn vom Strassengraben auf, nachdem er sein Auto gegen einen Baum gesetzt hatte. zum “Dank” kotzt die Glatze den Rolls Royce ihres Chefs voll und demoliert die Scheinwerfer. Ein übler Zeitgenosse, jedenfalls auf den ersten Blick und für Leute, die sich selbst für “etwas Besseres” halten.
Unterwegs verstaut Jenny noch den farbigen Anhalter Kola auf dem Rücksitz, der sich in seiner Haut nicht gerade wohl fühlt neben dem vermeintlichen “Ausländerhasser”.
Genügend Sprengstoff also für eine turbulente Reise, die 24 Stunden später für Überraschungen sorgt und so manches Missverständnis korrigiert…Read More »
the AMG clerk wrote :
“Exploring a dystopian future which has parallels to those found in Brazil, Fahrenheit 451, and 1984, this film, tells of a place where a military junta has taken control and requires people to think, speak, and act in precise ways: anyone who fails to do so is killed. The story is told entirely without the use of spoken dialogue. Symbolic imagery replaces much of what would have been spoken in a narrative, establishing the situation and setting. In the story, two brothers are part of an underground organization opposed to the totalitarian regime. Members of the underground identify themselves using pieces of torn photographs. Reviewers found that the story is told intelligibly and quite swiftly, despite the absence of dialog, but is not quite lively enough to satisfy action buffs.”Read More »
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It took Todd Haynes four years after Poison to get funding for Safe (1995), an emotionally devastating portrait of insulated domesticity, centering on Carol White (Julianne Moore), a San Fernando housewife who develops peculiar health problems. Carol’s immune system is compromised by an “environmental illness,” an all-encompassing allergy to chemicals that has baffled the medical establishment and gained the moniker “20th Century Disease.” Helpless, she turns to a self-help organization that leads to greater isolation from the real outside world.Read More »
La mort du jeune aviateur anglais tells the story of a British airman whose grave Marguerite Duras discovered near Deauville. Although we don’t know where fiction begins, Duras’ narrative has a remarkable authenticity. A veritable manifesto of spontaneous writing, brilliantly directed by Benoît Jacquot, where the “direct writing” of Duras meshes perfectly with the unpretentious approach of the filmmaker. (Allocine)Read More »