Quote: Lila Cassen was the most successful Spanish singer of the 90s until she disappeared mysteriously from one day to the next. Ten years later, Lila is preparing her triumphant return to the stage but, shortly before the eagerly awaited date, she loses her memory as the result of an accident. Violeta is dominated by her conflictive daughter. Every night she escapes from her reality doing the only thing that makes her happy, imitating Lila Cassen in the karaoke where she works. One day Violeta receives a fascinating proposal: to teach Lila Cassen to be Lila Cassen again. Read More »
Quote: Directed by Ko Nakahira. With Mariko Kaga, Akira Nakao, Takeshi Kato. Yuka is a “good-time girl” from Yokohama who is persuaded by her papa to sleep with a foreign business executive so that he can close an important deal. Nakahira presents a shrewdly observed portrait of a modern, sexually assertive woman—an unsettling character for a changing but still patriarchal society. 93 min. – MoMA note: this film played under the title of Monday Girl for the MoMA’s Japanese film retrospective in 2005 Read More »
Film Review Georges Franju’s last film for the cinema was to be his second homage to the silent Louis Feuillade crime serials of the 1910s – the first being his inspired remake of Judex in 1963. Nuits rouges is a curious cinematic beast that owes as much to the adolescent American fantasy-thriller serials of the 1940s and 1960s as it does to Feuillade. It is certainly not what you would have expected from a man with a reputation as a serious filmmaker and co-founder of the Cinémathèque Française, France’s national film library. Read More »
Quote: Lord Loam has modern ideas about his household; he believes in treating his servants as his equals – at least sometimes. His butler, Crichton, still believes that members of the serving class should know their place and be happy there. But when the Loam family are shipwrecked on a desert island with the self-reliant Crichton and between maid Tweeny, the class system is put to the test. Read More »
A love triangle through the four seasons. A young woman, living in a relationship, falls in love with a married man. If someone had told her that she in a few months should be the man’s mistress, she would become aggrieved and indignant. She was certainly not a woman who would mess with married men. Read More »
Quote: British theatrical director Peter Glenville made his film directorial debut with 1955’s The Prisoner (Glenville had previous helmed the London stage production of this Bridget Boland play). The film is based on the real-life travails of Hungarian Cardinal Mindszenty, who after suffering under Nazi persecution was imprisoned by the new Communist regime for remaining loyal to his religious convictions. Alec Guinness, his head shaved, plays an unnamed Cardinal in an unspecified Eastern European country who is clapped into jail. Here he is ordered by the politicos to issue a phony statement to his flock, one that will effectively end Catholicism in his country. Jack Hawkins plays the diabolically clever “Interrogator”, who is almost successful in convincing Guinness that his false statement will have a beneficial effect. The Prisoner fared better in its American release than it did in Europe, where it was branded both “pro-Communist” and “anti-Communist” by various single-issue pressure groups. Read More »
Norman is a window cleaner who has to clean a manor house with hundreds of windows. He is distracted by the son of the house who persuades him to go into town. When some villains try and kidnap the young heir Norman fights them off but the heir has banged his head and can’t remember Norman’s heroic stand. Read More »
