English

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader wrote:
Except for The Saga of Anatahan, this 1929 release is probably the most underrated of Josef von Sternberg’s sound pictures, and it’s underrated for the same reason: Sternberg is known almost exclusively as a visual stylist, but the most exciting thing here is the highly creative sound track. It’s Sternberg’s first talkie–a near remake of Underworld, a spiritual romance about a doomed gangster, with the same lead (George Bancroft) and Fay Wray–and although this is a minority opinion, I find it better than the original in many ways. With Richard Arlen and Tully Marshall.Read More »

Cronin Mitchell (Tony McCabe) is an average guy whose face is disfigured by a falling electrical power line in which he somehow acquires the gift/curse of strange psychic powers. After withdrawing from public life, ‘Mitch’ makes a living as a fortune teller when he’s approached by an ugly hag who offers to restore his good looks if he becomes her lover. Mitch reluctantly agrees, and although his face is restored, people around him see his lover as an attractive young woman named Ellen (Elizabeth Lee). When news of Mitch’s psychic powers leak out, he goes on the road with Ellen from city to city and town to town helping people solve crimes. After expelling a ghost from a funeral home, Mitch and Ellen are sent to a small Illinois town to find the identity of a serial killer. But the government sends along a crackpot psychiatrist/playboy, named Dr. Alex Jordan (William Brooker), to oversee the case and possibly debunk Mitch’s psychic abilities. When Dr. Jordan turns his sights on Ellen and plots to steal her away from Mitch, she goes to great efforts to prevent that from happening while helping Mitch try to find the serial killer.Read More »

Captain EO (alternately, Captain Eo) is a 3-D film formerly shown at Disney theme parks.

The film stars Michael Jackson. It was directed by Francis Ford Coppola, executive-produced by George Lucas, photographed by Vittorio Storaro, produced by Rusty Lemorande, and written by Lemorande, Lucas and Coppola. The score was written by James Horner, and featured two songs (“We Are Here to Change the World” and “Another Part of Me”) by Michael Jackson. The Supreme Leader was played by Anjelica Huston. from wikiRead More »

After being banned from South Africa thirty years earlier for his reporting during the apartheid era, award winning filmmaker and journalist John Pilger goes back with Alan Lowey to witness the benefits that democracy has brought to its people. Pilger questions to what extent has the black majority benefited from the democratic changes in comparison to the white minority.Read More »

I could be bounded in a nutshell and call myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams…

Quote:
Hamlet is a 1996 film version of William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, adapted for the screen and directed by Kenneth Branagh, who also stars in the titular role as Prince Hamlet. The film also features Derek Jacobi as King Claudius, Julie Christie as Queen Gertrude, Kate Winslet as Ophelia, Michael Maloney as Laertes, Richard Briers as Polonius, and Nicholas Farrell as Horatio. Other notable appearances include Robin Williams, Gérard Depardieu, Jack Lemmon, Billy Crystal, Rufus Sewell, Charlton Heston, Richard Attenborough, Judi Dench, John Gielgud and Ken Dodd.Read More »

Glorious (2009, Canada, 12 min.)
Glorious tells the story of an aging crime family patriarch, holed up in a derelict apartment block. Maddin pulls out all the stops as the film unfolds into an orgy of paranoia, bursting ammo shells, rackety disarmaments and oral gratification from beyond the grave. Featuring the music of British/Dutch composer Richard Ayres.Read More »

Fancy, Fancy Being Rich combines Guy Maddin’s favorite film fetishes and is thus instantly recognizable as one of his flamboyant creatures. His visual technique replicates the scratched and scarred silver nitrate skin of the silent films he idolizes. His works have an operatic flavor, as if perfectly located on a melodramatic borderline between repression and release. Perhaps this also explains the hilarious sexual symbolism that runs rampant through his intricately imagined and riotously perverse mise en scene.Read More »

While their mother is dying in the modern Gimli, Manitoba hospital, two young children are told an important tale by their Icelandic grandmother about Ainar the lonely, his friend Gunnar, and the angelic Snjofrieder in a Gimli of old.Read More »

Guy Maddin (Sullivan Brown) reluctantly returns to his childhood home, an abandoned Canadian island, where his parents ran an orphanage. As Guy fulfills his dying mother’s request to paint the lighthouse which served as the orphanage, memories of strange events there overpower him. An undercover investigation by child author/detective Wendy (Katherine Scharhon) and a revolt by the repressed children, blew open a cover-up by Guy’s parents. Wendy disguised herself as her brother Chance and discovered that Maddin’s inventor father performed outro scientific experiments on the orphans. In black and white, with title cards, plus narration by Isabella Rossellini. In the film’s opening weeks, some showings included live narrators (such as Crispin Glover, Lou Reed, Barbara Steele), an orchestra, a castrato, and costumed sound effects techs.Read More »