Drama

  • Lina Wertmüller – Notte d’Estate Con Profilo Greco, Occhi a Mandorla, e Odore di Basilico AKA Summer Night (1986)

    1981-1990ComedyDramaItalyLina Wertmüller

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    Synopsis:
    Fulvia is a wealthy industrialist whose made her money as part of a rich conglomerate that supposedly supports the environment. She and her cohorts are sick and tired of a boorish Sicilian renegade named Beppe. He has been behind a recent string of kidnappings and has cost the elite almost $100 million. Fulvia decides to get even. She hires a CIA super spy to snatch Beppe, and when he succeeds, the rogue is taken to Fulvia’s secluded island estate. There he is held for ransom, and taunted by Fulvia for being a brute. When Beppe demands sex as part of his sentence, things go from simple to complex in this crazy criminal scenario.Read More »

  • Yasujirô Ozu – Tôkyô boshokuAKA Tokyo Twilight (1957)

    1951-1960ClassicsDramaJapanYasujiro Ozu

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    Synopsis:

    Two sisters live with their father. The younger sister is embroiled in an affair and becomes pregnant. The elder sister has run away from her husband and returned with her child to her parent’s home. Both sisters are astonished when their mother, long thought dead, turns up alive. The sisters are even more stunned when they learn what their mother’s life has been.Read More »

  • Jan Troell – Nybyggarna AKA The New Land (1972)

    2011-2020DramaJan TroellSweden

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    Quote:
    For many, The New Land will be where Jan Troell’s two-part Swedish immigrant story set in 19th-century America really starts to take off. In many ways, The Emigrants was merely preamble to get us here.

    Released in 1972, a year after the previous entry, The New Land picks up the story of the Nilsson family almost immediately after the final scene in The Emigrants. Karl Oskar (Max von Sydow) has claimed a patch of riverside Minnesotan land as his own, and he’s bringing Kristina (Liv Ullman) and the kids, along with his younger brother Robert (Eddie Axberg), to start transforming it into a home and farm. The work will be hard, but it ends up being rewarding, and the Nilssons become part of a growing community of Swedish transplants.Read More »

  • Wim Wenders – In weiter Ferne, so nah! AKA Faraway, So Close! (1993)

    1991-2000DramaFantasyGermanyWim Wenders

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    Quote:
    In Faraway, So Close! angels watch over the people of Berlin. The world weighs heavily upon these men and women. Their attachment to things diminishes their desire for the invisible. As one angel laments, “It’s so exhausting to love people who run away from us.”

    Despite the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, the people of Eastern Europe are anxious about the future. The angel Cassiel, played by Otto Sand, feels great compassion for them. When a young girl falls from the balcony of her high-rise building, his urge to do good is so strong that he crosses over into humanness and catches the girl in his arms on the street. All he loses in this change of existence are his wings and ponytail.Read More »

  • Tim Hunter – The Saint of Fort Washington (1993)

    1991-2000DramaTim HunterUSA

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    PLOT:
    Matthew, a young schizophrenic, finds himself out on the street when a slumlord tears down his apartment building. Soon, he finds himself in even more dire straits, when he is threatened by Little Leroy, a thug who is one of the tough denizens of the Fort Washington Shelter for Men. He reaches out to Jerry, a streetwise combat veteran, who takes Matthew under his wing as a son. The relationship between these two men grows as they attempt to conquer the numbing isolation of homelessness.Read More »

  • Andrei Stefanescu – #Beings (2015)

    2011-2020Andrei StefanescuArthouseDramaGermany

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    Beings is the second feature film of Stefanescu Andrei, after Sleep Awake in 2012, is also a micro-budget film, this time shot in Berlin with a small magical crew in the autumn of 2014.
    It is a contemplative film about Eva a girl that leaves everything behind, a deep friendship with her friend Anna and her betrayed love for Teo, to lose herself into light. To get away from her skin and become perfect so that she will be loved by Teo.
    The story begins with Eva having a epileptic fit and being kicked out by Teo instead of being helped. This starts the crisis of Eva and her desperate return to Teo and then the failed night of love. Everything brakes loose. Not only her, but also Teo who out of guilt begins his descent into madness together with Anna, Eva’s best friend that also loves Teo irrational and against any moral or law.
    Eva’s trip has no goal but in her journey each step is like a magic moment like a step outside reality until she becomes one with the sky forgetting everything she is and starting new.Read More »

  • Wen Jiang – Yang guang can lan de ri zi AKA In the Heat of the Sun (1994)

    1991-2000ChinaDramaFifth Generation Chinese CinemaWen Jiang

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    Quote:
    Beijing, the Seventies. Now that the Cultural Revolution has driven most adults to the provinces, 14-year old Monkey and his pals have free reign over the city. They hang around, get up to no good and discover that unsolvable mystery more commonly referred to as ‘girls’.

    In the Heat of the Sun is a beautifully shot semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story where the ostensible nostalgia is undercut by an ironic narrator, who keeps blurring the line between what’s real and what may be imagined (“Wait, maybe it didn’t happen that way,…”). It’s a movie not just about memories, but also about the act of remembering and on how difficult that is, in a city which constantly re-builds itself from the ground up, in a country which constantly rewrites its own history.Read More »

  • Naomi Kawase – An AKA Sweet Bean (2015)

    2011-2020DramaJapanJapanese Female DirectorsNaomi Kawase

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    Quote:
    It is easy to forget what a breath of fresh air Kawase Naomi once seemed within Japanese filmmaking circles when she first emerged, aged just 18, at the turn of the 1990s with a series of highly personal Super 8 diaries and experimental films. The subsequent international recognition for her Caméra d’Or-winning feature debut Suzaku (1997) trailblazed a path for a new generation of women directors, such as Nishikawa Miwa and Tanada Yuki, who have since established successful commercial careers, slowly eroding the long-entrenched gender imbalance within the industry.Read More »

  • Ken Russell – Women in Love (1969)

    1961-1970DramaKen RussellUnited Kingdom

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    Quote:
    Ken Russell’s celebrated and controversial film is a lyrical take on love and death as experienced by a Britain ravaged by World War One. Based on D H Lawrence’s acclaimed novel, it tells the story of two couples trapped between the pressure to follow convention and the urge to explore a Bohemian lifestyle. Set against the lush English landscape, the protagonists engage with nature in a direct and sensuous way, each searching for love but unsure what it means. Featuring stunning performances by Alan Bates, Jennie Linden, Oliver Reed and Glenda Jackson (whose role earned her an Academy Award), Women in Love is opulently designed, beautifully shot and is an undisputed landmark of British cinema.Read More »

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