Nagisa Oshima’s groundbreaking film opens with young, attractive Mako and her friend hitching a ride from an old man. After her friend leaves, the man tries to rape her, and she is saved only by the handsome Kiyoshi. Later, against the background of the tumultuous 1960 U.S./Japan Security Treaty demonstrations, Kiyoshi and Mako walk along a grungy seaside lumberyard while talking about sex. He attempts to kiss her, she slaps him, and he throws her in the water. She cries out that she can’t swim. When she continues to refuse his advances, he steps on her fingers as she clings to a log. Read More »
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Nagisa Oshima – Seishun Zankoku Monogatari AKA Cruel Story of Youth (1960)
1951-1960AsianDramaJapanNagisa Oshima -
Darya Zhuk – Khrustal AKA Crystal Swan (2018)
2011-2020ArthouseBelarusDarya ZhukDramaIn 1990s Belarus, a wanderlust young DJ is derailed by a typo in a forged US Visa application, forcing her to a backwater village where she is determined to fake her way to the American dream.Read More »
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Arnaud Desplechin – Jimmy P. (2013)
2011-2020Arnaud DesplechinDramaFranceAt the end of World War II, Jimmy Picard, a Native American Blackfoot who fought in France, is admitted to Topeka Military Hospital in Kansas – an institution specializing in mental illness. Jimmy suffers from numerous symptoms: dizzy spells, temporary blindness, hearing loss… In the absence of any physiological causes, he is diagnosed as schizophrenic. Nevertheless, the hospital management decides to seek the opinion of Georges Devereux, a French anthropologist, psychoanalyst and specialist in Native American culture.Read More »
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Henry Hathaway – Souls at Sea (1937)
1931-1940DramaHenry HathawayUSAGary Cooper and George Raft play a couple of seafaring buddies in this moral adventure
saga set during the 1840s, when the slave-trade had been outlawed by the British
Empire but was still a reality on the high seas. In its depiction of the friendship between
two men, one of questionable character, the film bears some similarities to Hathaway’s
Spawn of the North, made the following year.Read More » -
Aníbal Di Salvo & José María Paolantonio – El juguete rabioso (1984)
1981-1990Aníbal Di SalvoAníbal Di Salvo and José María PaolantonioArgentinaArthouseDramaQueer Cinema(s)This is an adaptation of one of the most important novels of Argentine literary modernism, Roberto Arlt’s El juguete rabioso (1926). Similar in many ways to Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1917), this novel (and the film) chronicles a young man’s journey through a life of poverty on the margins of society in Buenos Aires among anarchists and gangsters during the first years of the 20th century. The novel is essential reading for an understanding of subsequent Argentine literature, yet it is little known outside of Argentina. In El beso de la mujer araña AKA Kiss of the Spider Woman (1976), Manuel Puig was very consciously drawing the whole conceit of the homosexual ‘traitor’/’lover’ and the political prisoner directly from this book.
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Alan Rudolph – Return Engagement (1983)
1981-1990Alan RudolphDocumentaryUSATimothy Leary and G. Gordon Liddy went on a debating tour in 1983. This odd couple apparently bonded in prison, or some shit, despite Liddy personally busting Leary in the 60’s! They debate about a wide variety of issues from their very unique perspectives.
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Dejan Zecevic – T.T. Sindrom (2002)
2001-2010Dejan ZecevicHorrorThrillerYugoslaviaSeveral people get locked in a turkish bath at night, being hunted by a brutal serial killer, who seems to be seized with the T.T. Syndrome, a brain malady that leads to painful sociopathy.Read More »
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Lutfi Akad – Kanun namina aka In the Name of the Law (1952)
1951-1960DramaLutfi AkadTurkeyÖmer Lütfi Akad, aka Lütfi Ömer Akad, (b. 1916) is a Turkish film director, who directed movies from 1948-1974. In 1949, he debuted as a film director with Vurun Kahpeye (“Kill the Whore”) an adaptation of Halide Edip Adıvar’s book of the same title. He became one of the pioneers of the period in the “Director Generation”. The 1970s trilogy, The Bridge; The Wedding; and The Sacrifice, is considered his masterpiece. Afterwards, he withdrew from movie making instead directing adaptations for TV.Read More »
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Sang-ok Shin – Cheonnyeon ho AKA A Thousand Year Old Fox (1969)
1961-1970ActionFantasySang-ok ShinSouth KoreaIMDB:
Once upon a time, under the reign of the three kingdoms, there was a woman who tempts a Buddhist priest named Cho. She is a one-thousand-year-old fox who intends to reincarnate as a human being. Not knowing this, Cho lives with the fox. But in the end, they get separated harboring sadness of unfulfilled love in this world.
– Written by KCCLA Read More »