Tag Archives: USA

When lovable nerds Gilbert and Lewis embark on their freshman year at Adams College, little do they realize the perils that await them. They’re beset by taunting from the jocks of Alpha Beta fraternity, which only worsens when the jocks accidentally burn down their house and toss the freshmen out of the freshmen dorm. To make matters more problematic Lewis develops a crush on pretty Betty Childs, popular sorority sister and quarterback’s girlfriend. Joined by the aptly named Booger and the violin-playing Pointdexter, the nerds soon realize they must form their own fraternity in self-defence. Soon the tables are turned as the nerds employ high-tech warfare against the jocks…. but can they really win and make a difference?
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Due to an experimental vaccine, Dr. Robert Neville is the only survivor of an apocalyptic war waged with biological weapons. The plague caused by the war has killed everyone else except for a few hundred deformed, nocturnal people calling themselves “The Family”. The plague has caused them to become sensitive to light, as well as homicidally psychotic. They believe science and technology to be the cause of the war and their punishment, and Neville, as the last symbol of science, the old world, and a “user of the wheel”, must die. Neville, using electricity, machinery, and science attempts to hold them at bay.
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Phoenix secretary Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), on the lam after stealing $40,000 from her employer in order to run away with her boyfriend, Sam Loomis (John Gavin), is overcome by exhaustion during a heavy rainstorm. Traveling on the back roads to avoid the police, she stops for the night at the ramshackle Bates Motel and meets the polite but highly strung proprietor Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), a young man with an interest in taxidermy and a difficult relationship with his mother.
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In order to help bring Nazis to justice, U.S. government agent T.R. Devlin (Cary Grant) recruits Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman), the American daughter of a convicted German war criminal, as a spy. As they begin to fall for one another, Alicia is instructed to win the affections of Alexander Sebastian (Claude Rains), a Nazi hiding out in Brazil. When Sebastian becomes serious about his relationship with Alicia, the stakes get higher, and Devlin must watch her slip further undercover.
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A D.A. becomes the prison warden where he tries to help an inmate he prosecuted, because he believes his sentence was excessive. Read More »

Ricardo, a young law student in his home town of Madrid, is a carefree playboy who loves nightclubs and courting pretty girls. His father hopes to instill a more serious attitude in his son by transferring him to a school in the rural town of Santiago. At Santiago, his father’s old friend is to be his guardian. When Ricardo arrives at Santiago he joins a fraternity, and continues his carefree lifestyle while serenading and courting his guardian’s daughter, Carmina. But when Ricardo’s former girlfriend Goyita arrives for a visit, events take a serious turn …
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Tobe is a teenage girl in a dysfunctional American family, but one that appears both realistically normal and deeply embedded in suburbia. This is the landscape of Spielberg, but the family, inadequate father, rebellious daughter and quasi-autistic stepson, seems alienated and distant from the world around it. Into this milieu drifts Harlan, a young man whose roots are at least partially fantasised, part cowboy part movie cliche, and whose reality remains unclear. The pair embark on a romance that threatens her father, captivates her little brother and is destructive to them all. The sparse writing avoids cliche in this subtle, ethereal, independent film that is thought provoking in its mock simplicity.
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Snobbish and wealthy Joanna Stayton (Goldie Hawn) is living a life of leisure with her husband, Grant (Edward Herrmann), when she falls off their yacht and suffers amnesia. Grant takes the opportunity to rid himself of the demanding Joanna – but Dean (Kurt Russell), a widowed carpenter with four kids who once worked for Joanna, arrives and claims she’s his wife. Joanna can’t remember her past identity, but has trouble believing that she was ever meant to be a working-class mother of four.
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In California, an old man (Bela Lugosi) grieves the loss of his wife (Vampira) and on the next day he also dies. However, the space soldier Eros and her mate Tanna use an electric device to resurrect them both and the strong Inspector Clay (Tor Johnson) that was murdered by the couple. Their intention is not to conquer Earth but to stop mankind from developing the powerful bomb “Solobonite” that would threaten the universe. When the population of Hollywood and Washington DC sees flying saucers on the sky, a colonel, a police lieutenant, a commercial pilot, his wife and a policeman try to stop the aliens.
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TOKYO-GA, Spanish poster art, 1985, ©Gray City

Taking a breather from the Paris, Texas shooting, Wim Wenders hopped a plane, camera in hand, to look for the Tokyo enshrined by the late Yasujiro Ozu (whose work Wenders dubs “the sacred treasure of the cinema”). What he found instead, documented in this filmic journal, was an urbanized dislocation not far from the forlorn emptiness he coached out of German and American vistas. Whether abstracting businessmen teeing off atop skyscrapers or the rigorous, artisanal craft of building a wax sandwich display, Wenders scrambles for humanity seeping through neon and steel – a humanity linked, inevitably, to the old Japan of Ozu’s films (rebellious tykes, cherry blossoms, tranquil countrysides). A far less queasy piece of hero-worship than Lightning Over Water, the picture meditates not so much on Ozu the filmmaker than on Ozu the vanishing feeling, motifs and images reconsidered in a modernized Japan circa 1983 (the trains that fill the Japanese master’s pictures with notions of inexorable movement have now become bullet expresses, gliding with smooth, ominous impersonality). Elsewhere, Wenders bumps into Werner Herzog (who bitches about having to space-travel to find pure images nowadays), Chris Marker (whose Sans Soleil would make a superb double-bill with Tokyo-Ga) and two aged Ozu stalwarts, gracious, dignified leading man Chishu Ryu and anecdotal camera operator Yuuharu Atsuta. Wenders’ eulogy for a culture alienating its own roots is built, characteristically, upon cinema’s capacity for regenerative beauty, though his links to Ozu are, if anything, more tenuous than his affinity with Nicholas Ray – Ozu’s images distill life, Wenders’ etherealize it. Cinematography by Edward Lachman.
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Seemingly happy gun enthusiast Bobby Thompson (Tim O’Kelly) tells his wife Ilene (Tanya Morgan) that he’s feeling disturbed, but she hasn’t time to hear him out. Aging horror film star Byron Orlock (Boris Karloff) reluctantly agrees to a public appearance at a drive-in, even though he’s bitter and has announced his retirement. Their paths will eventually cross, as Tommy embarks on a wave of modern horror that outpaces anything in Orlock’s old movies.
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Newspaperman Bill Bradford becomes a special agent for the tax service trying to end the career of racketeer Alexander Carston. Julie Gardner is Carston’s bookkeeper. Bradford enters Carston’s organization and Julie cooperates with him to land Carston in jail. An informer squeals on them. Julie is kidnapped by Carston’s henchmen as she is about to testify.
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After Leila, his boss’s daughter, is kidnapped by psychopathic plague victim Decker, chauffeur Chazz teams up with plague-infected mercenary Luger to penetrate the toxic & off-limits Plague Zone and bring her back alive.
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Larson E. Whipsnade runs a seedy circus which is perpetually in debt. His performers give him nothing but trouble, especially Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. Meanwhile, Whipsnade’s son and daughter, Phineas and Vicky, attend a posh college. Vicky turns down her caddish but rich suitor Roger Bel-Goodie, but changes her mind when she learns of her father’s financial troubles. Will Vicky marry for money or succumb to the ventriloqual charm of Edgar Bergen? Will Whipsnade’s Circus Giganticus make it over the state line one jump ahead of the sheriff?
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In a hill city of war-torn China, the American mission hospital is run by Dr. Gray Thompson and Dr. Sara Durand, who secretly loves him. Then Gray comes back from the USA with new equipment …and new wife Louise, who is jealous of Sara, shows herself a coward in the first Japanese air raid, and wants to take Gray back to the States. Others have similar troubles; and Japanese prisoner Colonel Yasuda manipulates them for his own ends.
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