John Turturro

Primo Levi’s modern day odyssey from the concentration camp to his home in Italy. The Truce is a film about homecoming.

The horror and the suffering of the concentration camps has been well documented. What interested the director, Francesco Rosi, was to bring to the screen what Levi succeeded in doing so extraordinarily well in his book: recounting, through the tales of his remarkable adventures, the process of reawakening, of coming back to life, and of the re-acquisition of hope, through the experience of daily events, small and large, natural and joyous, the cumulative effect of which is to constantly affirm the superiority of love over death.Read More »

Set in 1958. On an NBC game show, “Twenty-One”, a working-class Jewish student remains king of the show for weeks. The show’s producers decide to create a new champion by feeding a new contestant, middle-class Charles Van Doren, with the right answers. He becomes a symbol of intellect to students and the nation. Based on a real life incident.Read More »

From The New york Times
Grimly austere barely begins to describe the atmosphere of dread that seeps through “Fear X” like a toxic mist. The movie’s ominous mood is deepened by Brian Eno and J. Peter Schwalm’s ambient background score, which haunts the movie with faraway groans and rattles.

If “Fear X,” the American filmmaking debut of the Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn, promises far more drama than it finally delivers, its glumness never abates. Whether contemplating the shabby cottages in a snow-swept Wisconsin suburb or scanning the flatlands of Montana, the camera, which stealthily follows the protagonist’s suspicious eyes wherever he looks, imagines danger crouching in every shadow.Read More »

From IMDb:
Traces the Beats from Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac’s meeting in 1944 at Columbia University to the deaths of Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs in 1997. Three actors provide dramatic interpretations of the work of these three writers, and the film chronicles their friendships, their arrival into American consciousness, their travels, frequent parodies, Kerouac’s death, and Ginsberg’s politicization. Their movement connects with bebop, John Cage’s music, abstract expressionism, and living theater. In recent interviews, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Kesey, Ferlinghetti, Mailer, Jerry Garcia, Tom Hayden, Gary Snyder, Ed Sanders, and others measure the Beats’ meaning and impact.Read More »

From IMDB:
A highly styled ‘genre’ film which can perhaps be seen as a pastiche of all gangster movies. Tom Reagan is the laconic anti-hero of this amoral tale which is also, paradoxically, a look at morals within the criminal underworld of the 1930s. Two rival gangs vie for control of a city where the police are pawns, and the periodic busts of illicit drinking establishments are no more than a way for one gang to get back at the other. Black humour and shocking violence compete for screen time as we question whether or not Tom, right-hand man of the Irish mob leader, really has a heart.Read More »

Margherita, a director in the middle of an existential crisis, has to deal with the inevitable and still unacceptable loss of her mother. Read More »