1990s

After the death of his beloved fiancée, a man reads her diary and finds out that she was having an affair with a young construction worker.Read More »

Directed by the late, great Jun Ichikawa (Tony Takitani, Dying at a Hospital); about the storied Tokiwa apartment that in the 1950s housed up-and-coming manga luminaries such as Osamu Tezuka, Shotaro Ishinomori, Fujiko Fujio and numerous others.

Mark Schilling of the Japan Times called Tokiwa: the Manga Apartment one of the best Japanese movies of the 90s; Kinema Jumpo named it among the 200 greatest Japanese films of all time.Read More »

Quote:
A Tokyo Businessman with his wife and son are walking the high street when his son is kidnapped by a group of street thugs. While in pursuit of his son the father is shot by one of the thugs with a strange device. After the thugs oddly return his son, the father starts to notice odd changes with his body that occur in moments of anger. Only to be terrorized constantly by this, the father decides to locate the gang and kill them all.Read More »

DIDN’T DO IT FOR LOVE is a documentary portrait of Eva Norvind, a.k.a. Mistress Ava Taurel, born Eva Johanne Chegodaieva Sakonskaya in Trondheim, Norway. The film follows Eva’s many careers, from her time as a showgirl in Paris to becoming Mexico’s Marilyn Monroe in the 1960s to establishing herself as New York’s most famous dominatrix in the 1980s. Using clips from Norvind’s Mexican films, stills from various periods, and interviews with friends, partners and family, Treut’s documentary traces Eva’s search for the wellspring of her obsessive and dark sexuality.Read More »

Throughout his work, documentary filmmaker Errol Morris has sought out characters lost in their own eccentric worlds, and he has managed to convey their sense of wonder with their passion, be it a topiary gardener arguing the merits of hand shears in Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997) or astrophysicist Stephen Hawking discussing the origin of the universe in A Brief History of Time (1992). In his most provocative work since The Thin Blue Line (1988), Morris details what happens when this interior dreamscape collides with the hard facts of history. As a young man accompanying his father to work at a state prison, Fred A. Leuchter, a bespectacled mouse of a man, learned how inefficient and inhumane most executions were, and he set out to design and build a better electric chair. Soon he began getting offers from state institutions throughout the country to redesign their electric chairs, along with gas chambers, gallows, and lethal injection machines. Read More »

Clarke Fountain, Rovi wrote:
Celia, who calls herself Ginevra, is a movie actress who is appearing in an art-film. When she collapses from exhaustion while browsing in a bookstore and subsequently has a car crash, she decides to run away, throwing away her belongings and attempting to live incognito with a bar singer. Eventually she returns to her oh-so-boring life and shuttles between two additional lovers while working on the set of “Tears of an Angel.” Some allusions are made to the Arthurian and Camelot myths, but these are not developed. Reviewers found the main attraction of this “art film” to be the numerous sex scenes between the star (played by Amanda Ooms) and her various lovers.Read More »

The movie depicts the daily struggle of vaccum cleaner salesmen in the region of Stuttgart, Germany at the tail end of the 90’s. What sounds dry is a deep and unmasking look into the homes of german housewives and housemen and the salesmen struggling to get by. The movie is driven by the daily incidental, often hilarious interactions of salesmen and to-be customers. The movie interrogates the essence of southwestern german housewives and housemen and salesmen alike by removing the narrator and letting the respective counterparts play out all of the interactions.Read More »

Lt. Frank Janek investigates the unsolved murder cases in the city of New York. The newest challenge presented to the Central Station is a man who likes to kill the girls with a singular method: drug overdose. There is a man who likes to kill young women by the singular method of the drug overdose. Janek investigates with a bit of the jitters because there is a television reporter who goes all out to criticize the work of the police. The case then explodes in his hands when one of the girls found dead is the niece of the Head of Homicide.Read More »

Quote:
A black and white documentary film about dance and possession in Haitian vodou that was shot by experimental filmmaker Maya Deren between 1947 and 1952 and edited and completed by Deren’s third husband Teiji Ito and his wife Cherel Winett Ito (1947-1999) in 1981, twenty years after Deren’s death. Most of the film consists of images of dancing and bodies in motion during rituals in Rada and Petro services. Deren had studied dance as well as photography and filmmaking. She originally went to Haiti with the funding from a Guggenheim fellowship and the stated intention of filming the dancing that forms a crucial part of the vodou ceremony. The film that resulted, however, reflected Deren’s increasing personal engagement with vodou and its practitioners (Wilcken, 1986). While this ultimately resulted in Deren disregarding the guidelines of the fellowship, Deren was able to record scenes that probably would have been inaccessible to other filmmakers. Deren’s original notes, film footage, and wire recordings are in the Maya Deren Collection at Boston University’s Howard Gotlieb Archive Research Center.Read More »