Nora Helmer, years earlier, committed a forgery in order to save the life of her authoritarian husband, Torvald. Now she is being blackmailed and lives in fear of her husband finding out and the shame such a revelation would bring to his career. But when the truth comes out, Nora is shocked to learn where she really stands in her husband’s esteem.Read More »
Alissa Wilkinson wrote:
‘The Substance’ Review: An Indecent Disclosure
Demi Moore stars in an absurdly gory tale of an aging actress who discovers a deadly cure for obscurity.
In Vladimir Nabokov’s 1930 novel “The Eye,” a sad-sack Russian tutor living in Berlin dies by suicide, and then spends the rest of the book skulking around the living — watching, obsessing over their lives. He eventually realizes something bleak: Most of us see ourselves only through the eyes of others, through the stories we think they make up about us from the glimpses they get of our lives. “I do not exist,” the narrator writes near the end of the book. “There exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me.”Read More »
Quote:
In the 19th century, a fortress is under siege from the Turkish Army. While the attack is going on, the town’s people are in the theatre, watching a play based on the life of notorious tall tale teller Baron Munchausen.
The real Baron Munchausen arrives at the theatre and claims not only to have started the war, but also to be able to save the town from the siege. He encounters only mockery from an incredulous townsfolk who dismiss the Baron and his stories.Read More »
From Carol Reed, the renowned director of Night Train to Munich, Odd Man Out, The Fallen Idol, The Third Man, The Man Between, Trapeze and Oliver!, comes this thrilling drama starring Ralph Richardson (The Sound Barrier), Trevor Howard (The Offence), Robert Morley (When Eight Bells Toll), Wendy Hiller (Separate Tables), Kerima (The Devil Is a Woman), George Coulouris (Citizen Kane), Wilfrid Hyde-White (The Browning Version) and James Kenney (The Slasher). When the immoral Peter Willems (Howard) is accused of stealing in his position at a Dutch East Indies port, he persuades the man who gave him his start in life, the merchant ship captain Lingard (Richardson), to take him up-river to a secret trading post on a remote Indonesian island. There, he falls in love with the beautiful native woman Aissa (Kerima), as the cunning Babalatchi (Coulouris) tries to trick and blackmail him into disclosing the entrance of the secret trading route. Beautifully shot in black-and-white by John Wilcox (The Last Valley) and Edward Scaife (An Inspector Calls), Outcast of the Islands is a compelling adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s classic novel.Read More »
Imdb:
In 1792, John Evans, a farmhand from Snowdonia travelled to America to discover whether there was a Welsh-speaking Native American tribe walking the Great Plains. Over 200 years later, distant relative Gruff Rhys (Super Furry Animals) retraces the explorer’s route through the continent by means of an investigative concert tour. A unique project that blurs the boundaries of music, literature and film and investigates what really happened in the heart of the new world.Read More »
On Christmas Eve, a young boy builds a snowman that comes to life and takes him to the North Pole to meet Father Christmas.Read More »
A celebrity actress who gets her dream role playing real-life 19th century serial killer Belle Gunness in a feature film, starts to take on the characteristics of the character both on-screen and off.Read More »
A butler working in a foreign embassy in London falls under suspicion when his wife accidentally falls to her death, the only witness being an impressionable young boy.Read More »
Michael Billington:
There are many ways of approaching Shakespeare’s youthful tragedy: Rob Ashford and Kenneth Branagh take the scenic route in this new production. We are plunged into a vividly imagined 1950s Italy of dark-suited men, petticoated women, bicycling friars, patriarchal oppression and frantic partying. You feel Fellini is due any moment to film it with a movie camera and, even if the result has its oddities, the production certainly has a pulsating energy.Read More »