Rutger Hauer

SYNOPSIS:
Los Angeles, year 2019. Cynical ex-cop Deckard (Harrison Ford) is a retired assassin of rogue androids (called “replicants”). His former boss, Bryant (M. Emmet Walsh), presses him into service: he is to kill a group of physically superior replicants that are on the loose after escaping from an “off-world” colony. Deckard visits the Tyrell Corporation, where he encounters mogul Eldon Tyrell (Joseph Turkel) and his assistant, Rachael (Sean Young). Tyrell informs Deckard that Rachael is a new breed of replicant–implanted with memories, she believes herself to be human. Bent on speaking to Tyrell in order to find out what their “termination dates” are, two of the replicants–Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) and Pris (Daryl Hannah)–insinuate themselves into the home of geneticist J.F. Sebastian (William Sanderson), who created the replicant design for Tyrell. In the meantime, two more of the replicants have been disposed of and Deckard has become romantically obsessed with Rachael.Read More »

Plot:
1938. A small group of Dutch students stop their tennis game momentarily to hear of England’s entry into World War II. Erik and his friends don’t show much concern at first. But when Queen Wilhelmina flees Holland for London and the Germans move in, it becomes necessary to choose sides.

Soldier of Orange, directed by Paul Verhoeven (Turkish Delights) is based on the true life adventures of Erik Hazelhoff who received numerous decorations including Holland’s highest honor — the Militaire Willems-orde. It is interesting to see how Erik’s friends take different courses: a Jew inevitably dies once the German’s arrive; another associate joins the Nazi army; a third becomes active in the Dutch resistance movement; and a fourth betrays everyone in order to save his Jewish girlfriend.Read More »

Description
Heavily based on the novel by Richard Rashke, Escape From Sobibor tells the
inspirational true story of the only successful mass-escape from a Nazi concentration.

In 1942 Operation Reinhard, the final solution to the Jewish question was put into operation. Three death camps were built in Eastern Poland, near the Russian border, at Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor. Sobibor opened in March 1942. Initially, three gas chambers housed in a brick building used carbon monoxide to kill Jewish prisoners, with three more gas chambers added later.Read More »

Synopsis:
The story of a woman’s love for two young men. Antwerp, 1940. Lieve marries Adriaan, a Flemish idealist who is drawn towards Germany by the occupation to the Eastern Front. She shelters the resistant François in 1942 and discovers with him what love is really about. At the liberation, she’s reunited with a bruised and sentenced Adriaan. In spite of her passion for François, she cannot bring herself to abandon him in these trying circumstances. But she slowly drifts away from her husband, while she senses that François, who is monopolized by his career, is slowly drifting away from her.Read More »

Quote:
Leave it to an old master to strip a complex question down to its basics, leave aside all the anxiety and handwringing, and discover compassion as a basic reflex, a core value of a Europe few seem to recall. Michael Sicinski for Cargo: “Ermanno Olmi’s The Cardboard Village stars Michael Lonsdale (fresh from his turn in Xavier Beauvois’s Of Gods and Men) as an elderly Italian priest in the final days before his retirement, watching as his church is deconsecrated, the pews pushed into a corner by a forklift, Christ deposed from the cross by a crane. In the night, the priest takes to the pulpit and addresses the absent congregation. ‘Where have you all gone?’ he asks? Unbeknownst to him, the town’s North African immigrants, hunted by the carabinieri, take up in the back storeroom. Eventually they build a tent city in the empty nave. The younger priest (Rutger Hauer) tries to convince the old man that it is too dangerous to harbor the refugees. ‘When charity is a risk,’ he says, ‘is precisely when it is necessary to offer charity.'”Read More »

When two orphans, Bianca and Tomas meet up with Tomas’ gym rat friends, they concoct an elaborate scheme to rob an aging movie star and one-time Mr. Universe, Maciste. The boys enlist Bianca to seduce the now blind star so they can get access to his hidden fortune. At once a sly psychological thriller with erotic overtones, this unique film finds a young woman faced with a moral dilemma as a unique friendship develops between her and the actor in his crumbling mansion. © Strand Releasing
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Plot / Synopsis

Ingrid Jonker lived an impossible contradiction, writing heart-rending poetry about being a woman of privilege living under apartheid rule, all the while dealing with pressure from the head of the censorship board, a man who also happened to be her father. “Black Butterflies” is the story of how Jonker, a woman with unending sexual cravings and a noted mental imbalance, managed to cope with this dichotomy. In the opening, the least poetic of a number of unconvincing metaphors writ large, Jonker is saved from drowning by handsome publisher Jack Cope, an older gentleman who immediately falls for the leggy writer. What he doesn’t know is that her self-abuse, due to living under the rule of her oppressive, emotionally-abusive father, has fractured her personality. She is not the creator she becomes when she puts pen to paper, but rather a little girl seeking stimulation (which she chases in a number of unavailable men) and hoping for the approval of her father (an impossibility).
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Quote:
Here is a film before which words fall silent. “The Mill & the Cross” contains little dialogue, and that simple enough. It enters into the world of a painting, and the man who painted it. If you see no more than the opening shots, you will never forget them. It opens on a famous painting, and within the painting, a few figures move and walk. We will meet some of those people in more detail.

The painting is “The Way to Calvary” (1564), by the Flemish master Pieter Bruegel the Elder. We might easily miss the figure of Christ among the 500 in the vast landscape. Others are going about their everyday lives. That’s a reminder of Bruegel’s famous painting “Landscape With the Fall of Icarus,” about which Auden wrote of a passing ship “that must have seen something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.” Extraordinary events take place surrounded by ordinary ones.Read More »