This spoof on tours, guides, and the "holy" sites of Israel concerns thirty year old Jonah Sidas, who had a typical Jewish-Israeli upbringing; he was born and raised in Jaffa, graduated from high school and served as a paratrooper in the army. One day, Jonah donned the cross and black gown of the priesthood; now he guides pilgrims around Tel-Aviv, which he believes is a holy city for the Christian faith. Join Jonah and his unwitting group of tourists on an insane two-day tour of Tel-Aviv.
ALL tangled up in the madness of a Rio de Janeiro carnival, full of intoxicating samba music, frenzied dancing and violent costumes, the Frenchman Marcel Camus presents us a melancholy tale in his color film, "Black Orpheus" ("Orfeu Negro"), which came to the Plaza yesterday.
It is a tragic story of a Negro chap and a Negro girl who meet at the time of the annual blowout, fall suddenly and rapturously in love, whirl through the night in a furious revel and fall off a cliff in the dawn. At least, the fellow falls off the cliff, holding the dead body of the girl in his arms. She has been killed the previous evening while trying to escape a scoundrel in a skeleton costume.
Col. James Granilla is on a mission to learn about the Terranians and destroy their vessel. Terranians capture him, and he quickly blends in and gains their trust. In order to learn about them he ends up making love to their disgusting alien bodies (not so disgusting if you ask me).
This film is pretty corny. It's not pornographic, just lots of nudity such as films of the time had. The women in this film are quite beautiful, except for one way over-tanned blonde who looks like a ganguro girl.
With subliminal influences on everything from Austin Powers (1997) to Fight Club (1999) to Daredevil's assassin girlfriend Elektra, The 10th Victim stands as one of the least known yet insider-influential classics of the Sci-Fi Cinema.
NEW YORK CITY, SOMETIME in the near future: Across a construction site, a fashionably clad woman is being chased by an Asian man who fires wild pistol shots at her. Remarkably, no bystander or policeman intervenes. For as a thin, feverish spokesman tells us, these two are engaged in the "Big Hunt," a socially sanctioned killing game.
So what if Don Juan were a woman? I'm not sure if she would behave something like Brigitte Bardot's 1973 rendition of the famed lover, but it's considerably fun to watch her strut her stuff.
In Roger Vadim's interpretation of the Latin lover, Jeanne (Bardot) eats men for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. She takes a married politician and immediately ruins him by having him photographed at one of her orgies. She uses a hapless folk singer for sex and then leaves, prompting him to slice his wrists and bleed to death while strumming his guitar. She even extends her wiles to corrupting women, luring the innocent wife of a grotesquely self-absorbed businessman into the sack, then turning the tables on both members of the couple.
Synopsis: A couple sets out to find the perfect bride for their son, whether their son likes it or not, in this Israeli comedy. Zaza (Lior Louie Ashkenazi) is a graduate student in his early thirties who has finally found the woman of his dreams -- Judith (Ronit Elkabetz), a Moroccan immigrant with a daughter, Madonna (Sapir Kugman), from a previous marriage. Zaza and Judith have similar interests, a great personal rapport, a keen understanding of one another's feelings, and excellent sexual chemistry, but for Zaza there's one little problem -- his parents.
Deceptively simple and executed with a documentary feel, this drama represents a highly personal journey home for ex-patriot Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman. The film is divided into two sections. The first documents the paradoxical but sleepy existence in the Arab part of Nazareth. The second part takes a more political view of the city and in it, Suleiman takes a more active role. He has come to his former home in search of inspiration, but what he sees are many disturbing images of Arab people trapped in a cultural identity crisis, a point best illustrated by the plight of a young Arab woman who wants more independence than traditionally allowed in her part of town but cannot find it because of prejudiced residents on the Jewish side. -- Sandra Brennan
In the years after a rigid Production Code imposed morality on American cinema, occasionally a studio would go begging to the Production Code Administration. The studio would say, "Hey, we have this movie that was made before the Code. Please, please can we rerelease it?" Often the PCA would say no, but sometimes it would say, "OK, sure, but only if you make these cuts."
A strange young man takes his family's long tradition of bizarre behavior to new heights (or depths) in this wildly perverse and explicit horror comedy from director Gyorgi Palfi. Kalman Balatony (Gergo Trocsanyi) is a grotesquely fat gentleman who was fathered by an angry hospital orderly getting revenge on his boss by having sex with his wife. While the embittered husband killed the orderly when he was caught in the act, Kalman was born as a result of the wife's indiscretion, and when he grows to adulthood he earns a modest fame as a competitive eating champion.
Adapted by Jay Presson Allen from the French farce by Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Gredy, Forty Carats is a standard-issue sex comedy elevated by the performances of its stars. Fortyish Realtor Ann Stanley (Liv Ullman) finds herself attracted to Peter Latham (Edward Albert) - a man literally half her age. After a summer fling in Greece, Ann and Peter come to a parting of the ways, and that, Ann supposes, is that. Imagine her surprise when Peter comes to visit her back in New York. Though at first dismissed as a fortune hunter, Peter turns out to a financial whiz with a lot more in the bank than his lady friend. Both Ann's mother (Binnie Barnes, whose husband Mike Frankovich produced the film) and daughter (Deborah Raffin) are delighted at the prospect of Ann's romance with Peter -- the only one unsure is Ann herself.
Nowadays it seems indie festivals are the chic thing and filmmakers are trying too hard to get the status that winners of those "prestige" events get. If they would only look back to 1985 to a film like Static, they could learn a thing or two.
This film paces itself, and while never snappy, it uses its time wisely. While a melancholy mood prevales, we still are affected in many ways by the different characters we are introduced to.
When Milos Forman’s Loves of a Blonde had its American premiere at the New York Film Festival in 1966, it was an immediate sensation. Nothing quite as fresh and apparently spontaneous had appeared on the scene since François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows seven years earlier. Bosley Crowther, the chronically stuffy chief critic of The New York Times, flew into uncharacteristic paroxysms of pleasure, describing it as “delightfully simple and sure. It is hopeful—but realistic. And full of delicious characters.”
A small-time purveyor of blue movies has to defend his livelihood against thieves, authorities, and his widowed girlfriend and her family in Shohei Imamura's dark satire. The Pornographers concerns the exploits of the hapless Subu (Shoichi Ozawa), an impotent (in every sense of the word) middle-aged entrepreneur employing a small crew in the back room of a barbershop.
When not staging stag films in garages and secluded fields, Subu lives with the unhinged Haru (Sumiko Sakamoto), her Oedipal, high-minded son Koichi (Masaomi Kondo), and her impudent teenage daughter Keiko (Keiko Sagawa). Though he lusts after Keiko, the girl -- all too aware of her sexual power over men -- rebuffs his advances in an increasingly cruel manner, leaving Subu to channel his frustrations into the plots of his movies.
Karl and Hans couldn’t be more different. Karl is a young mathematician with a promising career at an insurance company, whereas the man-about-town Hans only takes up the odd job to get by. When they meet, Hans asks Karl whether he is happy. Karl doesn’t know what to reply until Hans shows him what makes him happy: girls, airplanes, the fastest backwards driving car in the world, and driving a Porsche at night in the nude along the Autobahn for example.
Two Humans, “Uncle Vova” and “The Fiddler” accidentally find themselves on another planet after pushing the wrong button on the strange device in the hand of an odd hobo, claiming to be an alien. Planet “Pluke” in the galaxy “Kin-Dza-Dza” looks like a desert. All “aliens” look human, and can understand Russian, after reading uncle Vova’s mind. Their own language is mostly telepathic and is limited to 11 words – 10 plus “koo” – all other words. The whole paradox of Pluke is that their civilization is much more advanced than ours in time and space traveling, weaponry and so on, but totally barbarian in the social way.
Lepetit, an ambitious and determined man, is named the new CEO of a department store. His mission is to improve the store's financial position. He decides that the human factor will be his catchword and introduces new methods, which he also applied to himself. But tensions slowly arise between members of the staff. (IMDb)
BRUCE BERESFORD'S ''Don's Party,'' an Australian comedy adapted by David Williamson from his well made play, is a well made film that, although it contains some sharp characterizations, a number of funny lines and one uproarious confrontation scene, never disguises its carefully schematized origins.
This is less a criticism than a description of the sort of piece it is. Once you recognize the form - and you do almost immediately - you watch it as you might watch players move around a Monopoly board. They can't be hurried up - there are rules that must be observed, and if you aren't part of the game, time drags.
In René Clair’s irrepressibly romantic portrait of the crowded tenements of Paris, a street singer and a gangster vie for the love of a beautiful young woman. This witty exploration of love and human foibles, told primarily through song, captures the flamboyant atmosphere of the city with sophisticated visuals and groundbreaking use of the new technology of movie sound. An international sensation upon its release, Under the Roofs of Paris is an exhilarating celebration of filmmaking and one of France’s most beloved cinematic exports.
François Truffaut's lavish and fun 1973 comedy-drama about a film production is a clever hall of mirrors, with Truffaut himself playing a director, and his most important actor in real life, Jean-Pierre Léaud (The 400 Blows), portraying Jacqueline Bisset's immature costar. Day for Night is full of tales undoubtedly told out of school and repeated here in camouflage, and one can't help but be impressed with the stylistic and technical means by which Truffaut captures the adventurousness of a full-budget shoot. The cast is very good all around, with actors in some cases playing fictional thespians and in other cases playing members of the crew. A sequence set to thrilling music by Georges Delerue celebrates the whole art of filmmaking as seen from an editor's perspective--it makes one want to drop everything and shoot a film of one's own. --Tom Keogh
The form of the film was really derived from the conceptual basis of the film. Because the concept of the film was destruction, the form became destructive as well.
- Věra Chytilová (1)
I wanted to use colour concepts to disparage a lot of things. I had no intention whatsoever of arousing an aesthetic impression of beauty. But somewhere, early in the game, it turned out that the structure of things with respect to each other created aesthetics whose results I didn’t expect at all.
