Film Reviews

A teenage girl comes to terms with the unexplained death of the boy next door.

Vicious gangster Vincent Canelli pulls off a daring prison escape just moments before going to the electric chair, taking with him Peter Manning – a bank robber and cop killer who was to die right after him. Taking several hostages along, they try to get their hands on the loot from Manning’s robbery to finance their escape from the country.

A true story of politics and art in the 1930s USA, centered around a leftist musical drama and attempts to stop its production.

French novelist Henri-Francois Rey adapted his novel Les Pianos Mecaniques with director Juan Antonio Bardem for this French/Italian/Spanish co-production, set in Spain. Vincent (Hardy Kruger) is recovering from a nervous breakdown in a seaside village on the Costa Brava. He enters into an affair with nightclub owner Jenny (Melina Mercouri), but their relationship changes when she falls for alcoholic author Pascal Regnier (James Mason), who is struggling to resume his writing career. Vincent eventually returns home, leaving Jenny to stay on with Pascal and his young son Daniel (Didier Haudepin). Their love enables him to start writing again.

A psychological thriller. One quite ordinary summer morning five different and unacquainted people leave their apartments at different floors and enter the lift. The doors close behind the last passenger and the lift starts descending. The moments pass, but the lift is not going to stop, the impression of endless moving appears and grows. Panic transforms into fear with every passing minute, situation is getting out of control. The lift cage transforms into closed space, into moving rattrap from which there is no escape. How would the five people behave in such hopeless situation? Their souls are assaulted by doubts and fear, they are filled with overwhelming feeling of inevitability and despair as around them the ordinary is turning into the unreal. Have you ever wondered what your companions in the lift are? Are they really what they claim to be? Or maybe you should fear them?

An American spy behind the lines during WWII serves as a Nazi propagandist, a role he cannot escape in his future life as he can never reveal his real role in the war.

"21-87 is a 1963 Canadian abstract film created by Arthur Lipsett that lasts 9 minutes and 33 seconds. The short film, produced by the National Film Board of Canada, is a collage of snippets from discarded footage found by Lipsett in the editing room of the National Film Board (where he was employed as an animator), combined with his own black and white 16mm footage which he shot on the streets of Montreal and New York City, among other locations."

Jota is about to commit suicide. As he fighting against himself, trying to jump off a bridge, a girl riding a motorcycle falls off the bridge. He runs to help her, and goes with her to the hospital. She has forgotten even what her name is, and he invents her life. He makes up a name for her and tells her and the doctors that they live together as a couple for four years. The lie goes on for a while..

A recovering alcoholic film director tries for a comeback in Rome.

My mother used to wake me up with a vinyl record. It's the first thing I remember about life. Many years have passed but vinyl records have never abandoned me. And you? Have you ever listened to a vinyl record? With its unique sound and crackling that gives you butterflies. Have you ever plunged into the colours of the sleeves artwork? Have you smelled it? Music captures a unique taste, seductive. In "Vinylmania" the director guides us through the grooves of an object that has never lost its soul. He investigates what makes it so legendary in a world dominated by liquid music: Simple nostalgia? Possession? The search for an idenitity? A cry against the fast food music? The digital river that has no heart or soul, just ones and zeros...

From Wikipedia: "On the Road is a Japanese documentary from 1964 directed by Noriaki Tsuchimoto. The film focuses on the taxi drivers of Tokyo in the year before the Tokyo Olympics and the difficulties they face: construction obstructing traffic, poor working conditions, numerous accidents, and bad pay. It becomes a critique of a changing and modernizing urban Japan."

In this classic adaptation of Emile Zola's novel, a tortured train engineer falls in love with a troubled married woman who has helped her husband commit a murder.

The two brothers Van der Laan, of strict religion, have been running Holland's most successful software company for 10 years when suddenly their financial manager leaves the firm. The lives of the brothers and their families get turned upside down when they hire a young hot shot financial specialist, in order to pursue their goal to bring the company to the NASDAQ.

A pair of working-class brothers flee their Reno Motel after getting involved in a fatal hit-and-run accident.

It's Halloween day in 1989 and college student Jackie Blue wants to enjoy a quiet birthday in the midst of a chaotic semester at school. Her friend Amber has other ideas and persuades Jackie to come to the annual Halloween party on campus after her shift at the local movie theater. As the night unfolds, it becomes apparent that Jackie will get more excitement than she bargained for on her birthday this year.