Tag Archives: english subtitles

In 73 BCE, a Thracian slave leads a revolt at a gladiatorial school run by Lentulus Batiatus. The uprising soon spreads across the Italian Peninsula involving thousand of slaves. The plan is to acquire sufficient funds to acquire ships from Silesian pirates who could then transport them to other lands from Brandisium in the south. The Roman Senator Gracchus schemes to have Marcus Publius Glabrus, Commander of the garrison of Rome, lead an army against the slaves who are living on Vesuvius. When Glabrus is defeated his mentor, Senator and General Marcus Licinius Crassus is greatly embarrassed and leads his own army against the slaves. Spartacus and the thousands of freed slaves successfully make their way to Brandisium only to find that the Silesians have abandoned them. They then turn north and must face the might of Rome.
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This rock opera tells the story of one year in the life of a group of bohemians struggling in modern day East Village New York. The story centers around Mark and Roger, two roommates. While a former tragedy has made Roger numb to life, Mark tries to capture it through his attempts to make a film. In the year that follows, the group deals with love, loss, AIDS, and modern day life in one truly powerful story.
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China’s enfant terrible Lou Ye returns after a five-year government ban on filmmaking with Mystery (2012), a rain-soaked melodrama set against the disconsolate mist of Wuhan’s impetuously erected industrial landscape. Opening with an explosive car crash, Ye’s latest is a tangled wreck of moral impasses and social inspection. Slicing through a sheet of unrelenting rainfall, two modified sports cars – driven by a group of insufferably affluent kids – race through the streets of the Hubei province capital. Their recklessness is dramatically halted, however, when they fail to notice a young woman who has wandered into the road.
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In this film, ‘Her’ refers to both Paris, the character of Juliette Janson and the actress playing her, Marina Vlady. The film is a kind of dramatised documentary, illustrating and exaggerating the emotionless lives of characters in the new Paris of the 60s, where commercialism mocks families getting by on small incomes, where prostitution is a moneyspinning option, and where people are coldly resigned and immune to the human nightmares of Vietnam, and impending Atomic war.
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Jessie McMullen (Sean Connery) is a widower, a tough guy and most of all, proud of his past as a career criminal (now semi-retired). He raised his son Vito (Dustin Hoffman) to follow in his footsteps, but Vito went straight once he had a son of his own, Adam (Matthew Broderick). Over the years, Vito became ashamed of his family’s criminal past. He has tried to raise his son right, which in his mind means keeping young Adam away from his deadbeat grandfather. Little does Vito know that this strategy has backfired; the mystery surrounding Jessie has caused Adam to idolize him.
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Rinku is a suicide-prevention counselor, living with her husband Shigehiko. He’s older than she, scrubbing things constantly, sexually indifferent. They sleep apart. During Tokyo’s rainy season, Iguchi, a photographer Rinku has counseled by phone, sends her pictures he has taken through her skylight: she’s wearing a short skirt, masturbating. He offers her the negatives if she’ll follow his instructions. She’s humiliated and agrees. He tells her he’s only giving her license to express her inner desires. He sends her into the night to walk on the wild side. Then, she asks a favor of him, and soon her husband receives phone calls and photographs. Where will this triangle lead?
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Saya (Yui Aragaki) is a young widow mother. Her husband Yutaro (Yo Oizumi) died in an accident. Yutaro abandoned his wealthy family to marry Saya. To protect her baby, she goes to the town of Sasara where her aunt lived. Her aunt passed her house down to Saya. Saya and her baby settles down there, but she has difficulties dealing with her situation. At this time, her dead husband Yutaro borrows other people’s bodies to help Saya, but Yutaro’s family tries to take her baby away.
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Maria (Lina Romay) is sentenced to life in prison for the murder of her sexually abusive father (Jess Franco). Upon her arrival at the prison, she meets the cold-blooded, sadistic wardress (Monica Swinn) and the spineless and equally sadistic Dr. Costa (Paul Müller). Together the two systematically torture and abuse the inmates, including Maria, who organizes a plan to rebel and escape. This ‘plot’ serves as an excuse for Franco to depict countless scenes of laughable violence and sordid sex, including lesbian trysts, rape, and female masturbation, with the director’s wild zoom lens performing close-up gynaecological examinations whenever possible.
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Kentaro is a lonely loser and geek. When he’s fired from his job, he also loses his dignity. At his lowest moment he goes out on the town to drink away his misery when he wanders into an abandoned building in the heart of the pleasure district. There he finds a pretty girl doll with skin so soft and warm to touch. Her skin is so lifelike that he can see the veins under the skin… but it is a doll without a heartbeat. In his muddled consciousness, the man sees the doll turn into a cyborg girl and save him from thugs. The doll becomes his guardian angel with a demonic twist as she fulfills his fantasies by becoming a cyborg girl, a swan-lake ballerina, and his girlfriend. This hallucinatory and erotic romance fulfills the man’s final erotic desires. Who is she really? And where will their romance lead them…?
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A raucous teen boy with a feminine face is teased everywhere, so his odd biker father dresses him as a girl and sends him to an all-girl school. The lad introduces himself as Sukeban, and a classmate, Michiko, takes him to after-school activities. Lessons on humility turn violent when a masked hatchet-wielding woman turns up. Jealousy, syringes of hormones, bare breasts, a blood bath, and more figure in the resolution.
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Continuing his penchant for directing films in the characteristically Japanese genre he virtually created, director Takashi Ishii here presents yet another stylish rape/thriller. Nami is an attractive woman, and she loves her husband, who runs the real estate agency she works at. One day, during a rainstorm, a mysterious drifter stumbles into her and, following her on her way back to the office, asks for (and gets) a job from her husband, over her protests. Not long after that, Nami and the newcomer are trading amorous glances. When the drifter gets her alone in a model house, he rapes her on the floor. For some reason, this doesn’t offend Nami, and she encourages the socially backward man to take her to bed often. Eventually, the two of them decide to do away with her husband, despite the fact that Nami still loves him.
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John and Laura Baxter are in Venice when they meet a pair of elderly sisters, one of whom claims to be psychic. She insists that she sees the spirit of the Baxters’ daughter, who recently drowned. Laura is intrigued, but John resists the idea. He, however, seems to have his own psychic flashes, seeing their daughter walk the streets in her red cloak, as well as Laura and the sisters on a funeral gondola.
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Bernhard Wicki’s astonishing The Bridge was the first major antiwar film to come out of Germany after World War II, as well as the nation’s first postwar film to be widely shown internationally, even securing an Oscar nomination. Set near the end of the conflict, it follows a group of teenage boys in a small town as they contend with everyday matters like school, girls, and parents, before enlisting as soldiers and being forced to defend their home turf in a confused, terrifying battle. This expressively shot, emotionally bruising drama dared to humanize young German soldiers at a historically tender moment, and proved influential for the coming generation of New German Cinema auteurs.
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In Paris, when the owner of the nightclub Mississippi in Pigalle Paul Latour is wanted by the police accused of distribution of forged dollars in his club, he asks his protégée and lead attraction of Mississippi Jean Clery to protect his beloved daughter Brigitte. Jean is engaged of the psychoanalyst Lily and brings the wild and rebel Brigitte from her conservative boarding school to his fancy apartment while Paul travels to Lausanne to meet a friend to clear his name. While waiting for the return of Paul, Brigitte turns Paul’s life upside down and they fall in love for each other. But the Parisian police and the counterfeit ring are chasing Brigitte, but Jean, his butler Jerome and his friends protect the girl.
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In International Gangs of Kobe the opposite occurs; it’s Sugawara’s presence that brings out Takakura’s ruthless side. Although the two start off as allied gang members, Kobe proves too small a town for the giants of yakuza cinema. The gang splits into rival factions and Takakura and Sugawara settle their differences with violence. Tons of action and a notable cast make the unexceptional International Gangs of Kobe a load of silly yakuza fun.
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