Quote:
Joel and Ethan Coen’s Fargo is a refreshingly original and complexly taut film that operates on a multifaceted level that is, all at once: compelling, macabre, funny, tragic, and even romantic. From the opening sequence of a car navigating agilely through an endless snow covered road with a car in tow, the Coen brothers deftly craft a highly engaging and comically sinister contemporary masterpiece. Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy), a Minneapolis car salesman, arranges to meet with two petty criminals in a Fargo bar, Carl Showalter (Steve Buscemi) and Gaear Grimsrud (Peter Stormare). His plan: to have his wife kidnapped and, consequently, extort money from his wealthy, but selfish, father-in-law. His down payment for their services: a burnt umber Sierra stolen from his father-in-law’s dealership. Driving back from Minneapolis, the kidnappers are stopped by a state trooper on an empty stretch of road in Brainerd for a minor registration violation, where events begin to go horribly wrong, resulting in the death of three people. A very pregnant Chief Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) is called in to investigate the crime scene, and solve the murders.

The pervasive theme of isolation is an essential element that is carefully woven through several aspects of the film. Note the birdseye view of Jerry returning to his car after being turned down for a loan, the upward shot of the ominous Paul Bunyan statue, and the barren winter landscape. Even a seemingly incongruous encounter with a former classmate is a portrait of alienation. The film is an exploration of the consequences of isolation: from the curious dialect of the townspeople to the desperate measures undertaken by Jerry in order to secure capital for a business venture. Fargo is a humorous, acerbic, and fascinating journey through American culture: through small-town gangsters, lounge acts, all-you-can-eat buffets…and senseless violence.

Joel Coen & Ethan Coen - (1996) Fargo.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1h 38mn
Size: 	2.14 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1024x560 
Aspect ratio:  	1.85:1
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	2 745 Kbps
BPP: 	0.200
Audio
#1:  	English 5.1ch AC-3 @ 384 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/00F8943B9FE47E1/Joel_Coen_&_Ethan_Coen_-_(1996)_Fargo.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English

The post Joel Coen & Ethan Coen – Fargo (1996) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
When an American human rights lawyer is assassinated in Belfast, it remains for the man’s girlfriend, as well as a tough, no nonsense, police detective to find the truth… which they soon discover to be contained in an audio tape which the man had with him, exposing political manipulations at the highest levels of government. But such underlying agendas require careful considerations to avoid worse things than murder.

Ken Loach - (1990) Hidden Agenda.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 48 min
Size: 	2.43 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1024x556 
Aspect ratio:  	1.85:1
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	3 000 kb/s
BPP: 	0.220
Audio
#1:  	English 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/E8E1DFF43A2B5C1/Ken_Loach_-_(1990)_Hidden_Agenda.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English

The post Ken Loach – Hidden Agenda (1990) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Plot / Synopsis
50 year old, retired goth rocker Cheyenne travels from London to New York to visit his dying father, and journeys across the United States on a mission to seek revenge against the elusive, ex-Nazi war criminal who persecuted him in Auschwitz. Despondent after two of his young fans commit suicide, Cheyenne retreats to his Dublin mansion and begins living off of his royalties alongside his down-to-earth wife Jane. Later, Cheyenne receives word that his father is dying in New York City. Though they haven’t spoken in 30 years, Cheyenne boards the first available flight to bid his father farewell. Unfortunately, Cheyenne is too late. Upon reconnecting with his cousin Richard, however, the morose musician learns that his father, a Holocaust survivor, had been tracking Auschwitz guard Aloise Lange (Heinz Lieven) around America for decades. Now filled with ennui yet determined not to let Lange escape unpunished, Cheyenne vows to pick up the mission where his father left off.
~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi

1.96GB | 1h 58mn | 1024×432 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/0DF7FAF683ABC47/Paolo_Sorrentino_-_(2011)_This_Must_Be_the_Place.mkv

Language(s):English, Hebrew
Subtitles:French

The post Paolo Sorrentino – This Must Be the Place (2011) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
If a little pearl-handled .38 goes off in the middle of the night and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Blood Simple invites such sardonic musings from the viewer. This is a film compelled by minutia, but housed within big questions encircling philosophy and geopolitics. An opening voiceover on the difference between Russia and Texas introduces audiences to Visser (M. Emmet Walsh), a private investigator fitted with a zippo and cowboy hat. He’s a sloth who’s also a sleuth, hired by Marty (Dan Hedeya), a barkeep who wants to know the man that his wife, Abby (Frances McDormand), has “been sluicing.” Across the desk from Marty, Visser tells him it’s Ray (John Getz), one of Marty’s defective employees. Marty tells him that, in Greece, they would cut off the head of a messenger bringing bad news just to make themselves feel better. Visser, more amused than frightened, retorts: “Give me a call whenever you want to cut off my head. I can always crawl around without it.” One wonders: Does that make Visser a chicken or a snake?

Writer-directors Joel and Ethan Coen wrench their characters to the core of their viscera, not their minds. Therein lies the filmmakers’ turn from the classical period of film noir. Take Visser’s name as a pun; he’s a hefty man with a thin moral compass. The Coens surely crib the character from Touch of Evil, but not simply as an homage. If Orson Welles’s film is generally understood to be the end of Hollywood’s initial noir cycle, then Blood Simple, financed and produced independently, announces a resurrection of the style under a different order of operations, one linking the production methods of the ‘80s slasher cycle and other low-budget horror films to the possibility of a neo-noir cycle that could manifest through similar means.

Unfortunately, no U.S. director, excepting John Dahl, heard the Coens’ call. The brothers’ visual interests here unmistakably emanate, on one level, from Joel’s work as an assistant director with Sam Raimi on The Evil Dead. But while many have noted the “shaky-cam” shot lifted from Raimi, used as Marty drags Abby out onto Ray’s front lawn, few have aligned the similarities of camera movements and techniques between Blood Simple and Halloween. James Naremore says Blood Simple contains “hyper-Wellesian tracking shots,” but the movements seem more approximate to the Steadicam as used by John Carpenter, so that whenever characters move through space, the camera emphasizes the space’s enclosure, not its widening. Moreover, Ray and Abby’s chat inside a car seems plucked straight from Halloween‘s post-prologue scene, with the rainy night creating a chiaroscuro effect of blacks and blues.

If Blood Simple is understood to be in dialogue with its horror contemporaries, analysis can shift from noir’s focus on psychological and existential fears to both that of the body in trauma and the body of genre cinema itself as a meaningful form for contemporary thought. Lest the Coens be lumped in with the pastiche hacks of the world, Blood Simple comprehensively thematizes miscommunication, rendering nearly every scene a meditation on some form of mixed signals.

The film’s focus on acts of speech extends to technological forms of cultural meaning. When Meurice (Samm-Art Williams), a bartender, hops across the bar to play Four Tops’s “It’s the Same Old Song” on a jukebox, the joint’s patrons—mostly white—are characterized through a single reverse shot, in which their confused looks and slight headshakes suggest displeasure at being denied their next honky-tonk anthem. Meurice’s act, though innocuous within the surrounding narrative, seems illustrative in hindsight of the Coens themselves as artists, determined to resurrect an oldie that many patrons—or viewers—preferring the homogenous background noise (of standard-issue Hollywood) won’t be interested in hearing.

The same goes for several fastidiously written conversations, particularly between Ray and Abby; they utter nearly one hundred lines of dialogue throughout the film without a clear exchange of meaning. Ineptitudes, whether in action or contemplation, yield characters with broken fingers, bloody noses, and holes in their guts. But Blood Simple cannot be reduced to its body count, because the Coens aim to break genre cinema’s glass ceiling of so-called style over substance. Some of it is rather puerile play with the medium itself, as when Ray’s car, which won’t start, itself momentarily halts Carter Burwell’s piano score. Most of the film, however, reforms cinematic meaning from within its archetypes, so that at the end, when Abby thinks she’s finally killed Marty, the collective force of the Coens’s tightrope walk hits our spleens with a force far greater than that of a butcher knife.

https://nitro.download/view/4CC5B7A6E358C86/Joel_Coen_-_(1984)_Blood_Simple.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English

The post Joel Coen & Ethan Coen – Blood Simple. (1984) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Synopsis
Mississippi Burning is a 1988 crime drama film based on the investigation into the real-life murders of three civil rights workers in the U.S. state of Mississippi in 1964. The movie focuses on two fictional FBI agents (portrayed by Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe) who investigate the murders. Hackman’s character is loosely based on FBI agent John Proctor, and Dafoe’s character is very loosely based on agent Joseph Sullivan.

+Commentary by Director Alan Parker

2.66GB | 2h 06m | 854×460 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/D6CD527DA43CB19/Mississippi.Burning.1988.4k.Remaster.480p.BluRay.x264-Spekt0r.mkv
http://www.nitroflare.com/view/82E0A7DA909BFD8/Mississippi_Burning_Theatrical_Trailer.rar

Language:English
Subtitles:English

The post Alan Parker – Mississippi Burning [+Extras] (1988) first appeared on Cinema of the World.