Tag Archives: english subtitles

A summertime daytrip along the railway line Rome-Orvieto on a special-fare train, a group of diverse and lively characters. Families, old couples, an unfaithful husband and his jealous wife, a forlorn girl, a nerdy white-collar worker and his flirtatious date, and a handsome, eagerly wholesome young man. Their stories merge and intersect in the beautiful scenery of a Medieval small town in central Italy.
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It’s been a year since Bill Cardew was declared dead by drowning, and his widow Vicky is now married to his old friend and business partner, Henry Lowndes. When Bill unexpectedly returns from the island where he was marooned, what is Vicky to do? Well, having twice been a rather neglected wife, Vicky finds all the attention from two husbands competing for her favors delightful, and is in no hurry to make a decision…much to the discomfiture of hapless Bill and Henry.
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A few hours at Berlin-Tempelhof airport. The thick fog force the travelers to persevere on the ground. Among them is a businessman who is facing ruin and not shy away, throwing his girlfriend to another man’s neck in order to save himself. A young actress has spent her last penny at the hairdresser and is stranded in a strange city. A farmer from Kenya falls spontaneously in love with a woman and offers her a new life.
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In her teenage years, Qian Yiehong (Yan Bingyan) rejected a boy out of political differences. He hit her back with a brick, and since then her back has hurt whenever it rains. Some time later, she falls in love with a married man, but he betrays her in the end, leaving her with the pain of abortion. Qian finally gets married to a man whom she does not love. But when she divorces him, he brutally extract his tooth to give as a souvenir to her…
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Helena Trestikova is the author of 10 episodes from the series Women on the Brink of the New Millennium, intimate portraits of both successful women and women on the social periphery. The tragic story of a girl named Katka who believes that joy and happiness can be applied through a hypodermic needle. All she is left with is despair. We first meet Katka at a rehab clinic in Nemcice, still full of optimism and faith in a drug-free future. The film tries to draw attention to the drug problem from a somewhat different point of view.
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Easily one of the most important directors of 1970s Taiwan cinema, Tsun-Shou Sung daringly tells the story of adultery by a young mother. In the unusual scenario, a young boy witnesses his mother’s cheating ways and, after the death of his sick father, grows to despise her. When he’s adopted by another family, the road to reconciliation proves achingly difficult.
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God and Satan war over earth; to settle things, they wager on the soul of Faust, a learned and prayerful alchemist. During a plague, Faust despairs and burns his books after failing to stop death; Satan sends Mephisto to tempt Faust, first with insight into treating the plague and then with a day’s return to youth. Mephisto is clever, timing the end of this 24 hours as Faust embraces the beautiful Duchess of Parma. Faust trades his soul for youth. Some time later, he’s bored, and demands on Easter Sunday that Mephisto take him home. Faust promptly sees and falls in love with the beautiful Gretchen, whose liaison with him brings her dishonor. Is there redemption? Who wins the wager?
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Actress Myrtle Gordon (Gena Rowlands) is a functioning alcoholic actress who is a few days from the opening night of her latest play, concerning a woman distraught about aging. One night a car kills one of Myrtle’s fans who is chasing her limousine in an attempt to get the star’s attention. Myrtle internalizes the accident and goes on a spiritual quest, but fails to finds the answers she is after. As opening night inches closer and closer, fragile Myrtle must find a way to make the show go on.
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It’s Sunday morning. The church bells call people to the Mass, but the army officer Arnost is still sleeping in his austere and shabby room in the barracks. He wakes slowly, and attunes himself step by step to the world and what to do this arid Sunday. He loads his pistol and puts it to his head and in his mouth, without firing it off. While he turns around, he is now and then interrupted by short flashbacks in his memory of situations with frivolous women and much drinking, as well as some daydreams about enforced weddings. He has a relationship with three blond women. Two of them are adult. One is willowy and a bit aloof, the other voluptuous and possessive. The third is a little girl, who he likes to talk with. He goes to the gatekeeper of the barracks, and starts a chat. Through a spyglass he suddenly sees two young women sunbathing topless. As it is within the military area, he orders the gatekeeper to arrest them. The women don’t take him seriously, but he writes a report.
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There were very few commercial feature films made during the Italian fascist era that were as openly propagandistic as this famous (notorious?) dramatic paean to the Blackshirts. The story takes place in a small village in Italy in October of 1922, on the eve of the fascist “March on Rome”, in which King Victor Emanuel III was persuaded to consign power to Benito Mussolini. Gianfranco Giachetti is Dr. Cardini, a doctor at the local psychiatric hospital, where a strike has been called by the local socialists. Cardini turns to the fascists to help avert the strike. His son Roberto (Mino Doro) rounds up fascist friends to fight those aligned with the strikers and the town’s socialists.
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18-year old Willi is living on the street – there are no goals in his life. There, he meets several people, helping but also cheating him. When he finally meets Monica, he realizes that there are people out there whose lives are even more desperate than his. So he’s trying to help her (and him) by planning a great robbery on a supermarket’s money transporter.
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Nolff, a tough Breton fisherman is happy: his wife has just given birth to a son, Michel. His only wish is to make him a fisherman like him. But when he becomes a man, Michel becomes a good-for-nothing who spends his time in taverns with his evil genius friend Gwenn la Taupe. The sea will be his judge.
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A Man Escaped opens with the indelible image of a pair of restless hands belonging to a French resistance officer named Lieutenant Fontaine (Francois Leterrier). His face is inscrutable and impassive, concealing his calculated attempt to flee from the escorted prison transport vehicle. He reaches for the door handle, retreats, then reaches again. At a momentary distraction of a crossing railcar, he seizes the opportunity, but is immediately recaptured, and is severely beaten by the German guards for the attempt. Imprisoned and condemned to die, Fontaine finds the courage and determination to escape his certain fate.
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From the dawn of man to the distant future, mankind’s evolution (or lack thereof) is traced. Often ridiculous but never serious, we learn the truth behind the Roman Emperor, we learn what REALLY happened at the Last Supper, the circumstances that surrounded the French Revolution, how to test eunuchs, and what kind of shoes the Spanish Inquisitor wore.
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Bill and Turner Ross’s Tchoupitoulas begins with wistful narration from its young protagonist, an impoverished African-American boy with a distinctly Southern drawl detailing a dream he’s recently had: “I don’t really have dreams,” he says, “but last night I did. It was actually a close-up of my future—like a flashback, except a flashing future. I was dreaming I seen me in the NFL, and I was playing for the New York Giants.” Right away, the similarities between this doc-fiction hybrid and Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild are evident, which makes sense considering both films are products of Court 13, a so-called “independent filmmaking army” made up of a group of ex-New Yorkers who moved to New Orleans in hopes of fostering a grassroots film community. But thanks to its decidedly less sensationalistic point of view, Tchoupitoulas proves the perfect antidote to the twee affectations of Zeitlin’s feature.
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