Kaput Lager - Gli ultimi giorni delle SS (1977)

 

Durng World War II, an American major is captured by the Germans and thrown into a POW camp run by a sadistic Nazi officer, whose main pleasures are whipping the local female population and...

Director: Luigi Batzella (as Ivan Kathansky)
Writer: Luigi Batzella
Stars: Richard Harrison, Lea Lander, Isarco Ravaioli

Une Femme Mariee AKA A Married Woman (1964)

 

Captured in beguilingly chic noir et blanc, Jean Luc Godard’s Une Femme Mariée (A Married Woman) is an erudite, somewhat autobiographical, handsome and twisted examination of female infidelity. Although it has been rather overlooked amidst Godard’s formidable body of work, it is one of his most alluring and personal cinematic endeavours and represents a critical juncture in his evolution as a film-maker.

Originally titled La Femme Mariée (The Married Woman), Godard bowed to the French censors, Commission de Contrôle, who were fearful of the film’s potential to be interpreted as an incendiary indictment of womankind. Made after his most commercial offerings Le Mépris (1963) and Bande à Part (1964), Une Femme Mariée marked a clear departure in style with a defiant, lovelorn Godard disenfranchised with the direction of contemporary Hollywood cinema (to whose mores he had never wholly subscribed); rejecting it as a source of both inspiration and provocation.

Jean-Pierre Melville - Le Samourai (1967)

 In a career-defining performance, Alain Delon plays a contract killer with samurai instincts. A razor-sharp cocktail of 1940s American gangster cinema and 1960s French pop culture—with a liberal dose of Japanese lone-warrior mythology—maverick director Jean-Pierre Melville’s masterpiece Le Samouraï defines cool.

Tone and style are everything with Le samouraï. Poised on the brink of absurdity, or a kind of attitudinizing male arrogance, Jean-Pierre Melville’s great film flirts with that macho extremism and slips over into dream and poetry just as we grow most alarmed. So the implacably grave coolness of Alain Delon’s Jef Costello is audaciously mannered, as he puts on white gloves for a killing and announces that for him “principle” is merely “habit.” (The film deserves one moment, one shot, of him alone in his room, when the impassive noirist suddenly collapses in unexplained laughter.) Whereas, as we see him stretched out on his bed, the source of a silent spiral of cigarette smoke, like a patient, tidy corpse-in-waiting, he is not just Delon, or some against-type Costello minus Abbott. He is the distilled essence of cinema’s solitary guns for hire, suspended between the somnambulant calm of Lee Marvin in Point Blank and the self-destructive dedication that guides Robert Bresson’s priest in Diary of a Country Priest.

Werner Herzog - The White Diamond (2004)

Werner Herzog once again turns his eye on the beautiful and dangerous wilds of the Amazon in this documentary. Dr. Graham Dorrington is a scientist who specializes in designing experimental aircraft, and in 1992 he invented a unique man-powered airship intended to travel into the Amazon canopy of Guyana, with the goal studying the medicinal herbs said to grow there. However, Dorrington's aircraft proved to be flawed, and an accident on its first voyage into the Amazon claimed the life of Dieter Plage, a filmmaker and close friend of Dorrington who had tagged along to document the journey. Ten years later, Herzog joined Dorrington as he returned to the Amazon canopy and explored the beautiful but forbidding rivers and forests, visited the people who live there, and recalled the accident that claimed his friend's life. The White Diamond was the opening night attraction at the 2004 Taiwan Documentary Film Festival.

Johnny To - Fong juk aka Exiled (2006)

Acclaimed Hong Kong filmmaker Johnny To returns to the characters of his international success The Mission (aka Chueng Fo) with this action-packed thriller. It's 1998, and the Portuguese colony of Macau, a city along the Southern coast of China, is about to be handed over to Chinese authorities under a long-standing agreement. As the people of Macau ponder how their new leaders will deal with the criminal underground that's long been part of the city's support system, a pair of hit men from Hong Kong arrive in town to execute a gangster who has turned his back on the syndicate to make a new life for his wife and children. While the Chinese syndicate want to be sure he doesn't share anything he learned while in their employ, two strong-arm men also arrive in Macau, determined to see to the former gangster's safety. Starring Nick Cheung, Simon Yam and Francis Ng, Exiled received its world premiere at the 2006 Venice Film Festival.