Robert De Niro

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Through its wildly comic, furiously creative, and intensely moving façade, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil ponders a future made to sustain a draconian past molded by inequality. In this dystopia, the rich, having long knelt at the alter of radical capitalistic tyranny, spend their days having their flesh stretched, sliced, and injected with ultraviolet potions, while the working class types, files, signs, and stamps its way through pointless paperwork. Overrun by communicative ducts, coated wires, cement and metals, and magnified, miniature computer screens, the future conjured up by Gilliam averts the familiar prophecy of an anaesthetized, plastic world overrun by rampantly advancing technology. Indeed, men, who see advancing technology as an affront to their fiscal station and take the pecuniary gain of the morbid, perverse 1% as their modus operandi, unmistakably run the future of Gilliam’s film. New technology is expensive; paper is cheap.Read More »

New York, 1955, Private Detective Harry Angel has a new case on his hands. Washed up crooner Johnny Favourite has gone missing. Witnesses, informants and anybody who might be holding clues are being murdered one by one. Angel is being kept awake at night by strange satanic visions and before long he suddenly finds himself being dragged into a world of sex, murder, voodoo and death.Read More »

After the international firestorm of Last Tango in Paris, Bernardo Bertolucci went on to create one of the grandest and most legendary epics in modern cinema. A stunning five-hour saga following the intertwined fates of two childhood friends born on the same day in 1901 at opposite ends of the social scale through five decades of class struggle.Read More »

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Structures within the time frame of empirical perspectives have a tendency to unknowingly look in the wrong direction. Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978) overcomes this problem by focusing on an intensely felt portrayal of the characterisation within a closed community that allows us to see the universality of a doom-inflected generation that blindly followed the path shown by the state. Time allows the peaceful reign to negate the demand for instantaneous discourse and the setting up of ideological walls that soon become entrenched. Over 30 years since it was first released, The Deer Hunter has become what it always was: a deep-rooted immersion into American blue-collar life.Read More »

Young film producer, Monroe Stahr, is a rising star in 1930’s Hollywood due to his ability to get anything he envisions done even if it means breaking a few rules. The latest film he’s working on stars two popular actors, Rodriguez and Didi, and everyone is sure it’ll be a smashing hit when it’s done. The times are changing however, since the first guilds and unions are being formed in Hollywood, but Stahr is still sticking to his old ways of doing things in spite of that. His main opponent becomes a union organizer, Brimmer, but Stahr finds ways to deal with him as well. However, in his hubris, Stahr crosses one red line too many when he falls for a young troubled engaged woman called Kathleen Moore and neglects Cecilia Brady, the young daughter of studio executive and Stahr’s boss, Pat Brady. Read More »

Synopsis:
In Los Angeles, circa 1940, an embittered, once-corrupt cop named Tom Spellacy is investigating two murders: that of a priest found dead in a whorehouse, and that of a mutilated woman in a park. As he searches for the culprits, Spellacy uncovers an immense web of corruption, involving prostitutes, dirty cops and pornography. Even the Roman Catholic Church is implicated, particularly one Monsignor Des Spellacy, Tom’s brother. Although Des is innocent of any wrongdoing, his actions raise moral and religious issues that Tom must deal with, in order to solve these bizarre murders.Read More »

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A mentally unstable Vietnam war veteran works as a nighttime taxi driver in New York City where the perceived decadence and sleaze feeds his urge to violently lash out, attempting to save a teenage prostitute in the process.Read More »

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Alan Parker paints a picture that is rich, dark and dank. While his flashy visual style may seem like sloppy editing, it poetically leaves a viewer with an odd, disorienting series of partial memories that blur in and out of one another. His script is equally as clever, if at times in need of tightening. Many small snippets of dialogue including the metaphorical rhetoric of Cyphre and the constant self-contradiction of Angel are easy to overlook in a single viewing. The dialogue gives lots of clues just like the ones Harry Angel has to work with: some subtle, some glaringly obvious.Read More »

SYNOPSIS
Brazil constitutes Terry Gilliam’s enormously ambitious follow-up to his 1981 Time Bandits. It also represents the second installment in a trilogy of Gilliam films on imagination versus reality, that began with Bandits and ended in 1989 with The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. To create this wild, visually audacious satire, Gilliam combines dystopian elements from Orwell, Huxley and Kafka (plus a central character who mirrors Walter Mitty) with his own trademark, Monty Python-esque, jet black British humor and his gift for extraordinary visual invention. The results are thoroughly unprecedented in the cinema.Read More »