synopsis
In this murder mystery, a homicidal maniac goes on a killing spree beginning with his wife. He then kills six of her friends and is preparing to murder a seventh when the intended victim dies naturally. As a substitute, he murders his favorite hooker, leading the police right to him.Read More »
SYNOPSIS
In a career-defining performance, Alain Delon plays a contract killer with samurai instincts. A razor-sharp cocktail of 1940s American gangster cinema and 1960s French pop culture—with a liberal dose of Japanese lone-warrior mythology—maverick director Jean-Pierre Melville’s masterpiece Le Samouraï defines cool.Read More »
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The luminous Gene Tierney, who starred in director Preminger’s breakout film LAURA, appears here as Ann Sutton, the kleptomaniac wife of a distant but loving psychoanalyst, (Richard Conte). When she is caught shoplifting, suave hypnotist David Korvo (José Ferrer) comes to her aid, but soon Ann finds herself enmeshed in far more dangerous crimes. Implicated in a plot that involves blackmail and murder, Ann is uncertain of her own innocence, but her husband is convinced that the hypnotist is behind the crimes. Loosely adapted from Guy Endore’s novel METHINKS THE LADY…, the script was penned by noted screenwriter Ben Hecht under a pseudonym during the Red Scare. Preminger, who was one of Hollywood’s top directors of the 1950s, combines characteristics of the noir film with the melodrama. He creates an incisive look at the very human flaws of its wealthy characters, as well as the manipulative charlatan who preys upon them; at the center of the story is the trouble afflicting an apparently happy upper-class marriage.
(review in yahoo movies)Read More »
A loner (Johnson) drives into a small Texas town and gets himself a job at a used car dealership. He gets an idea for robbing a small local bank after he tries to open a new bank account at the same time a fire occurs nearby. The bank was left open while all of the employees went to fight the fire. The manipulative boss’ wife (Madsen) wishes to use him for her own purposes: “I always get what I want, Harry”. He resists, however, as he finds himself falling in love with the accountant (Connelly) at work, who has her own problem to work out.Read More »
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.Read More »
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Carrying a gun
If there were awards for great titles then Bullet Ballet would surely be up for a gong or two. At once suggesting both violence and elegance, it sounds like the perfect Hong Kong era John Woo film, an all-action but balletic explosion of slow-motion gunplay that became the director’s trademark. But this isn’t John Woo, this is Shinya Tsukamoto, a director whose deeply personal style is a million miles from Woo’s slickly filmed action works. Tsukamoto’s concerns are far more localised, to the city in which he lives, to his neighbourhood, to his own body, and his cinematic style is far edgier and more dangerous. Which is not to knock Woo in any way, but nowadays when Woo is making the vacuous Paycheck, Tsukamoto is making the extraordinary A Snake of June. He is one of those rare directors who has never sold out and never compromised his vision. Tsukamoto is the very personification of a great outsider film-maker.Read More »
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Aki Kaurismäki is a cult and prolific Finnish filmmaker known for his offbeat, deadpan style. One of cinema’s great humanists, his films explore the misfortunes of the misfits and disaffected of Helsinki with great affection and droll, sometimes black, humour.
Although influenced by filmmakers such as Robert Bresson, Luis Bunuel and Jim Jarmusch, Kaurismaki has a distinctive cinematic style of his own, recognisable by his spare, economical visuals, eclectic soundtracks of vintage rock and pop and use of a regular troupe of actors, including Kati Outinen, Marko Peltola & Matti Pellonpaa… and dogs.Read More »
Synopsis:
Gangster boss Lung (Eddy Ko) is betrayed by someone within the own ranks who wants to see him dead. While Lung’s brother Frank (Simon Yam) is investigating the failed assassination attempt in order to find the culprit a unit of professional killers and bodyguards is put together to take care of Lung’s safety until the matter has been settled.Read More »
“A grim portrait of disaffection and loneliness, Gaspar Noe’s I Stand Alone is a movie clearly conceived to make a stir. With an armed, frustrated, and hate-filled time bomb at its center, it unabashedly recalls Taxi Driver, offering its own nihilistic spin on Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece of urban anomie and redemption. For a feature debut, it’s unbelievably daring. Noe doesn’t shy away from sprucing up his familiar story with Godard-ian flourishes, including occasional intertitles, a torrent of offscreen narration, and even a warning to the audience to leave before the wrenching finale. A more jarring conceit is the frequent use of abrupt cuts and fast dollies, accompanied by gunshots on the soundtrack. Genuinely startling and somewhat misconceived, the distracting device nonetheless goes some way toward evoking the volatile mindset of the protagonist. The movie shines a light on the circumstances that breed fascist and racist impulses. As politics, it isn’t terribly illuminating: Its depiction of underclass, xenophobic rage is shocking in its brutality but hardly revelatory in its insight. As a psychological interrogation, it’s more compelling, plunging the viewer into the mind of a disturbed man without sugarcoating. It’s this brazen willingness to shove something so repellent in its audience’s face that makes I Stand Alone both a courageous movie and an unpleasant experience. Whether the movie is genuinely probing or merely preoccupied with provocation is up for debate. What’s not is the movie’s visceral impact: This unrelenting essay about a lumpen brute sticks with you, despite — or perhaps because of — its lacerating bleakness” (AMG)
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