
A beautiful Italian woman is told by her black friend about the Carribean love god Jambaya who appears in the form of the snake. By the end of the movie, Cassini has decided to give herself to Jambaya while Cunningham departs with her white friend’s ex-lover, establishing a neat symmetry between their respective fantasies of exoticism.
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Monthly Archives: April 2016
Strange Cargo (1940) Frank Borzage, Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, Ian Hunter, Drama, Romance

Verne wants nothing more than to escape from a penal colony located off the northern coast of South America. He tries to involve Julie, a saloon girl, in his plans but she turns him in to the authorities. On Verne’s next try, he piggybacks on the escape of six other convicts and runs into Julie again in the process. One of the convicts is a spiritual figure who seems to know what will happen before anyone else. The group attempts to travel through the jungle, board a boat, and make it to the mainland.
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Koi yamabiko / Echo in the Mountains (1959) Masahiro Makino, Sumiko Hidaka, Yûnosuke Itô, Kunio Kaga, Drama

A man is brutally murdered and his famed shamisen (a three-stringed musical instrument) called the “Yamabiko” stolen. Prince Kogenta swears to avenge his father-in-law’s death and retrieve the family heirloom.
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Un uomo, un cavallo, una pistola / The Stranger Returns (1967) Luigi Vanzi, Tony Anthony, Daniele Vargas, Ettore Manni, Western

Taking the identity of a dead postal inspector found on the trail, a stranger rides into a small western town and finds himself in the middle of a stagecoach robbery perpetrated by a gang of twenty ruthless desperados. Finding out the object of the heist was not a strongbox as it seemed but a solid gold stagecoach, he enlists the aid of a down-and-out old preacher and tracks down the dangerous gang and their unsuspected ally.
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Ne okreci se sine / My Son Don’t Turn Round (1956) Branko Bauer, Bert Sotlar, Lila Andres, Zlatko Lukman, Drama

A partisan comes secretly to town to find about what happened to his little son who barely remembers him. He is horrified when he finds out that his son is raised in a colaborators’ orphanage, brought up to hate communists and partisans. He decides to take his son to the freed territory with him, but will he manage to escape the police checkings?
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Sunyeo / Water Lady (1979) Ki-young Kim, Jeong-cheol Kim, Ja-ok Kim, Il-woong Lee, Drama

Jin-seok returns from the Vietnam war, injured and marries Sun-ok. But financial difficulties cause them to argue. One day, Sun-ok brings bamboo trees from her parents’ home and succeeds in running a bamboo ware manufacturing company. Sun-ok has a stuttering problem and their son inherits the habit and he is sent to a special school. Meanwhile Jin-seok falls for Chu-wol and begins abusing Sun-ok. Chu-wol schemes to ruin his family, but Jin-seok escapes from her clutches and Sun-ok creates a special bamboo instrument. Their son’s stuttering problem is cured.
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I Dream Too Much (1935) John Cromwell, Lily Pons, Henry Fonda, Eric Blore, Comedy, Romance, Musical

Jonathan Street is a struggling composer when he meets and marries Annette. The problem is that Jonathan was drunk and does not want to be married. Annette does go with him to Paris and does the cooking and cleaning. To get his music published, Annette takes it to Paul and he is won over – by her voice and not the music. So he manages her career and she becomes a star as an opera singer everywhere she goes. Since Jonathan cannot sell anything he writes, he leaves Annette and that makes Annette sad as she wants only to be his wife.
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Great St. Louis Bank Robbery (1959) Charles Guggenheim, John Stix, Steve McQueen, Crahan Denton, David Clarke, Crime, Drama, Thriller

George Fowler is drawn into a gang planning to rob a bank in St. Louis that they expect will have a $100,000 on hand on an upcoming Friday. George is drawn into the plan as the gang’s driver by Gino, an old girlfriend’s older brother. As the gang goes about its planning, George and Gino have to find a way to live for the next two weeks and they turn to Gino’s sister, Ann, for help. George is hoping to go back to college and the money he would make would go a long way to helping him do that. Not trusting George to keep his nerve, the gang’s leader John Egan moves him to the inside, but the robbery doesn’t go off as planned.
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L’arrière pays / Hinterland (1998) Mathilde Moné, Henri Gardey, Jacques Nolot, Drama

After ten years away, Jacques Pruez, an unmarried, 50-year-old, modestly successful actor, returns to his home village to comfort his dying mother. His father Yvan, a family barber who’s counting on his “successful” son to support him in his old age, refuses to believe that his wife is sick and insists that her doctors are killing her. She dies, and Jacques finds out that Yvan is not his real father. Besieged by memories of his childhood, the village and the past, Jacques wanders the streets at night, reliving the moments that set him apart from the rest…
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The Circle / Der Kreis (2014) Stefan Haupt, Matthias Hungerbühler, Peter Jecklin, Marie Leuenberger, Documentary, Drama, Romance, Biography

Zürich in the mid 50‘s: The young shy teacher Ernst Ostertag becomes a member of the gay organisation DER KREIS. There he gets to know the transvestite star Röbi Rapp – and immediately falls head over heels in love with him. Röbi and Ernst live through the high point and the eventual decline of the organization, which in the whole of Europe is seen as the pioneer of gay emancipation. Ernst finds himself torn between his bourgeois existence and his commitment to homosexuality, for Röbi it is about his first serious love relationship. A relationship which will last a lifetime. The film looks back from the present to the time when the „Mother“ of all European homosexual organizations had its high point to the time it slowly fell apart. While the repression against homosexuals became increasingly more intense in Zürich, two young and very different men fight for their love and – together with their friends – for the rights of gays.
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