Plot:
Aging Cuban musicians whose talents had been virtually forgotten following Castro’s takeover of Cuba, are brought out of retirement by Ry Cooder, who travelled to Havana in order to bring the musicians together, resulting in triumphant performances of extraordinary music, and resurrecting the musicians’ careers.Read More »
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Mike Max is a Hollywood producer who became powerful and rich thanks to brutal and bloody action films. His ignored wife Paige is close to leaving him. Suddenly Mike is kidnapped by two bandits, but escapes and hides out with his Mexican gardener’s family for a while. At the same time, surveillance expert Ray Bering is looking for what happens in the city, but it is not clear what he wants. The police investigation for Max’s disappearance is led by detective Doc Block, who falls in love with actress Cat who is playing in ongoing Max’s production.Read More »
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Fresh from the tangled dramas of two temporarily halted film productions—including his collaboration with Coppola—Wenders used the cinematic quagmires as fodder for a film about filmmaking. Patrick Bauchau, a Wenders-like German arthouse director, is in the midst of making a black-and-white existential science-fiction feature called The Survivors in Portugal when his funding from a US studio is suddenly cut. The lull in production allows the cast and crew—which features Viva, Robert Kramer and Samuel Fuller—to ponder their relationships to the film and indulge in philosophical rambles and wandering detours, biding their time as needs, both creative and practical, float to the surface. Austerely zooming in and out of narrative focus, with an eye on both Hollywood noir and European arthouse, The State of Things meditatively and wryly captures little truths of cinema’s strange dimension. As Fuller’s cinematographer states, “Life is in color, but black and white is more realistic.”Read More »
Synopsis by Jack Rodgers
A car accident brings together a writer, his girlfriend, a publisher’s assistant, and a mother in mourning. James Franco, Rachel McAdams, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Marie-Josée Croze co-star. Directed by Wim Wenders.Read More »
The Million Dollar Hotel follows the supposed murder of Izzy Goldkiss. FBI Agent Skinner is sent into investigate the crime, and to weed out the killer. When he reaches the ‘hotel’, he comes across many of the forgotten types of people living in the city. You have Geronimo, who is a self proclaimed Native American artist. Dixie, played with great gusto by Peter Stormare, as the ‘fifth’ Beetle that is still waiting for his royalty payments, as well as recognition. Eloise, who is the neighborhood ‘whore’. And then there is Tom-Tom, played by Jeremy Davies. He’s the center of the story, being that he’s the ‘village idiot’ of the bunch, and has the trust of everyone in the Hotel. Agent Skinner has a few days to find out who the killer is, while the residents of the hotel devise a scheme to sell off Izzy’s fabled ‘Tar Paintings’Read More »
A beautiful summer day. A garden. A terrace. A woman and a man sit at a table beneath the trees, with a soft summer wind. In the distance, in the vast plain, the silhouette of Paris.
A conversation begins: questions and answers between the woman and the man. It deals with sexual experiences, childhood, memories, the essence of summer and the difference between men and women. It illustrates both, feminine perspective and masculine perception.
In the background, inside the house that opens onto the terrace, on the woman and the man: the writer, in the process of imagining this dialogue and typing it down. Or is it the other way around? Might it be that those two characters over there tell him what he’s putting down on paper: a long, final dialogue between a man and a woman?Read More »
Lightning Over Water is a penetrating and touching film of the last days of cult American director Nicholas Ray, most well-known for Rebel Without a Cause.
.”I knew that he wanted to work, to die working”, Wim Wenders says in the movie. And through his work with Wenders and the crew, Ray transformed his dying into an act of collaboration and a work of art.
Dying slowly of terminal cancer, Ray chose not to institutionalize himself in a hospice and fade away in an old people’s home but stayed in his modest New York City loft, surrounded by his closest friends — a sharp and poignant contrast to the comparative luxury of his Hollywood years.Read More »
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With Don’t Come Knocking, Wim Wenders revisits territory, both literal and metaphorical, first explored in Paris, Texas. Not only does he return to the Southwest, but Sam Shepard is back as co-writer. This time, he’s also the star. His Howard Spence is a movie cowboy who’s had enough. One day while working in Monument Valley, he takes off his boots and hops a train to Nevada to see his mother (Eva Marie Saint, lovely as ever). Little does he know that Sutter (Tim Roth), a by-the-books bondsman, is hot on his trail. Next, Spence travels to Montana where a sad young woman named Sky (Sarah Polley) is recovering from a recent death, while an angry young man named Earl (Gabriel Mann), who sounds much like Chris Isaak, plies the troubadour trade. Spence doesn’t know it yet, but they’re the results of a rambunctious past that will soon “come knocking,” as it were. Read More »
The plot
Based in part on detective-fiction writer Dashiell Hammett’s early experiences as a Pinkerton detective, this moderately-noir film has Hammett (using his little-known first name, Sam) involved in an elaborate extortion plot by his former detective agency mentor, Jimmy Ryan. Ryan shows up at Hammett’s San Francisco digs searching for a mysterious Chinese girl, Crystal Ling. He calls in a marker from Hammett’s days at the detective agency to get his help in finding the girl, who turns out to be a very sexy and shrewd former prostitute and porn star. She has photographs of San Francisco’s most influential citizens engaged in sexual fantasy with her and she means to turn them into a million-dollar payday. The tubercular Hammett must cope with an unfriendly police force, a mysterious gunsel intent on inflicting serious harm, and betrayal by supposed friends; to save the reputations of the powerful while tweaking their collective noses
Written by Joe Jurca, imdb.comRead More »