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Summary
Seven years after innovating the grisly Italian genre known as giallo, Mario Bava returned to the form to create one of its deliriously frightening examples: Hatchet for the Honeymoon (Il rosso segno della follia)...Stephen Forsyth stars as John Harrington, the head of an affluent fashion house, who harbors an uncontrollable bloodlust for women in bridal veils. Only by murdering a succession of them, each in a grisly manner, can he delve deeper into...
42) Love in the City
Summary
Six top Italian filmmakers pooled their talents on the omnibus "reality" feature Amore in Citta (Love in the City). The film is divided into five separate episodes. Michelangelo Antonioni's "Attempted Suicide", several would-be suicides discuss the reasons for their despair. Dino Risi's "Paradise for Three Hours" is a humorous glance at a provincial dance hall. Federico Fellini's "Marriage Agency" finds an investigative reporter posing as a husband-to-be....
43) Kira's Reason
Summary
Enjoying life in their mid-thirties, Kira and her husband Mads have a large house and two wonderful children. Their world is perfectly secure and comfortable until Kira develops a psychiatric disorder, which eventually commits her to a hospital. On being discharged, Kira's sole desire is to return to the normality of her previous life and fulfill her role as a good wife and mother. But, as she struggles to maintain equilibrium, she discovers Mads...
44) The Butterfly
Summary
Legendary actor Michel Serrault stars as Julien, an ornery butterfly collector. When eight-year-old Elsa and her often-absent mother move into the apartment next to his, the persistent and curious Elsa adopts a reluctant Julien as her surrogate grandpa. But when Julien leaves town for a week-long hiking expedition in the Alps to find the "Isabella," an exotic butterfly as elusive as it is beautiful, he instead discovers an uninvited companion - Elsa!...
45) Concrete Night
Summary
A stunning, dream-like odyssey through a beautiful and otherworldly Helsinki over the course of one evening, CONCRETE NIGHT follows the impressionable 14-year-old Simo as he keeps his soon-to-be incarcerated brother company. The official Finnish submission to the Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film captures the pain and joy of youth through exquisite, eye-popping black-and-white cinematography.
46) Terribly Happy
Summary
A taught, noirish psychological thriller about Robert Hansen, a Copenhagen police officer, who is transferred to a small provincial town following a nervous breakdown. Robert quickly finds himself mixed up in a community governed by its own rules.
Summary
Arrabal's second film; I WILL WALK LIKE A CRAZY HORSE (J'Irai Comme in Cheval Fou) forsakes the politcal allegory present in Viva La Muerte for a dramatic discovery of faith and organized religion. The story follows a man, Aden, who flees society after the death of his controlling mother. Out in the wilderness he encounters the beauty of nature, and under the tutelage of a hermit named Marvel, becomes a "normal homme." Aden falls desperately in love...
48) The Wonders
Summary
A family of beekeepers living in stark isolation in the Tuscan countryside are disrupted by the simultaneous arrival of a silently troubled teenaged boy taken in as a farmhand and a reality TV show intent on showcasing the family. Both intrusions are of particular interest to the eldest daughter, Gelsomina (Maria Alexandra Lungu), who is struggling to find her footing in the world...Awards:.Grand Jury Prize - Cannes Film Festival.Cannes Award - International...
49) Slogan
Summary
Serge is a hip and successful film director who leaves his pregnant wife to attend the annual advertising awards festival in Venice, and enters into a passionate affair with a young British woman. This sexy satire formed the background for one of the swinging sixties' most famous real-life romances. During the rehearsals for Pierre Grimblat's "Slogan", Serge Gainsbourg met the woman who would forever change his professional and personal life: Jane...
50) Playing Dead
Summary
Jean, a 40-year-old unemployed actor, has hit rock bottom. Insufferably clueless and egotistical, his over-the-top "method" acting and high-maintenance personality have gotten him fired from countless jobs. At the unemployment office, his counselor sets him up with a rather odd job: helping the police reconstruct crime scenes by standing in for the dead victim. Jean's obsession for detail impresses the beautiful chief investigator, allowing him to...
51) Killer Cop
Summary
A great example of a Poliziotteschi (Italo-crime) the film's plot, based upon the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan, begins with an explosion in a hotel killing dozens of innocent people. Police inspector, Matteo Rolandi is a witness to the massacre and the suspect, Franco Ludovisi is a young political activist. Ludovisi, even though the General Attorney Di Federico puts him under protection, is shot and killed. Behind this event there seems to...
52) The President
Summary
The latest film by acclaimed Iranian ex-pat director Mohsen Makhmalbaf (Kandahar, The Silence) tells the story of a dictator who is forced to personally confront the many people tortured by his regime after his government is overthrown. The president and his family rule the land with a draconian fist, enjoying a privileged and luxurious existence at the expense of his miserable and oppressed subjects. After a coup d’etat uproots his position of...
53) Deadly Sweet
Summary
Starring a seventeen-year-old beauty-contest winner, DEADLY SWEET is a most unusual crime story. In the film, a French actor finds his business contact lying murdered on the floor. Rather than call the police, he decides to protect the young woman at the scene and nail down the true killers, putting him on a collision course with the London underworld. DEADLY SWEET leads us through a mind-bending series of pop-art visuals by renowned erotic cartoonist...
Summary
Guernica is both a town that was leveled in a night of horror during World War II and an image, captured in paint by Pablo Picasso and on film by renegade surrealist Fernando Arrabal. The Guernica Tree is Arrabal’s most unflinching and personal film. It is a testimony to the horrors of war, the absurd chaos of life turned upside down and the ache of love. The fictional town of Villa Romero is the set upon which the events of Spain’s civil war...
55) In Bloom
Summary
This film follows inseparable friends Eka and Natia, both fourteen years old and at the end of their childhood in the early nineties Tbilisi, the capital of the newly independent Georgia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The country is facing violence, war on the Black Sea coast (Abkhazia) and vigilante justice that plague society. But for Eka and Natia, life just unfolds: in the street, at school, with friends or elder sisters who are already...
56) Motor Nasch
Summary
Six women from four generations look back on their lives in Moscow, covering the period between birth of the Soviet Union and its dissolving.
Summary
Once established as a master of the Euro-erotic horror film, Jess Franco continued to explore more traditional modes of filmmaking, setting familiar genres on their ears with his singular brand of reckless creativity. Made during the living dead craze of the early 1980s, Oasis of the Zombies is one of only a handful of motion pictures to explore a most peculiar subgenre of the movement: the Nazi zombie film...In telling the story of a cache of German...
58) A Married Woman
Summary
Legendary French New Wave auteur Jean-Luc Godard reverses the standard love triangle and challenges the influence of consumer culture in one of his most provocative dissections of modern life. Charlotte (Macha Meril) aimlessly drifts between morning affairs with the artistic Robert (Bernard Noel) and mundane evenings with her paternalistic husband Pierre (Philippe Leroy). Unsure of whether she loves either man, Charlotte discovers she is pregnant...
Summary
Leon is not like most 10-year olds. This innocent looking boy with an overly fertile imagination is a young hellion, a consummate liar and thief well-versed in breaking and entering his neighbors’ homes and running away from his own. His explosively dysfunctional family reaches new levels of lunacy when Mom decides to pack her bags to start a new life in Greece. Leon is prepared to do anything to kill the pain of it all, from destroying the neighbors’...
60) Island of Swans
Summary
When he is 14, Stefan’s parents decide to move the family to Marzahn, a desolate high-rise suburb of Berlin that isstill under construction. Stefan’s innocent childhood suddenly ends when he encounters the bullying of an older boy and his gang. Officials accused director Herrmann Zschoche and scriptwriter Ulrich Plenzdorf of giving a distorted, negative view of socialist reality. They required that the team make several edits and change the final...