Angel Deverell comes of age in Edwardian Cheshire knowing she will be a great writer. Rising above her class (her widowed mother has a grocery shop), Angel finds a publisher and a wide audience for her frothy romances. With royalties, she buys an estate, then she’s smitten by Esme, a rake from local aristocracy and an artist of dark temperament. She hires Esme’s sister Nora, who dotes on her, as a personal assistant, and pursues Esme. Angel is grandly self-centered, coloring her world as if it were one of her novels. When the Great War breaks out and reality begins to trump her will, can Angel hold on to her man and her public?
Read More »

A ruthless real-estate tycoon sets his sights on a small fishing village, which he believes he can buy cheaply and turn into a profitable tourist destination. He hires a handsome young ladies’ man named Junpei to seduce the women of the village and persuade them to sign over their land to his boss. He succeeds, but when the ladies discover the mens’ real plans, things take a different turn.
Read More »

For a decade, the white settlers and the Apaches have been engaged in a bloody war with no peaceful end in sight. When a white scout, Tom Jeffords (James Stewart), has a dangerously close but enlightening encounter with the natives, he begins to see the humanity in these “enemies.” Entering the Apache territory seeking peace, Jeffords forms a friendship with the Apache leader Cochise (Jeff Chandler), although there are people on both sides who resist extending the olive branch.
Read More »

In 1999, Gregory Peck (1916-2003) visits the Barter Theatre, Abingdon, VA, where he had acted in 1940 and where this evening he tells stories and answers questions about his career. Interspersed are clips from Peck’s films and from interviews recorded over the years and vérité contemporary footage of visiting with his daughter Cecilia before and after the birth of her son, receiving the National Medal of Arts, chatting with Lauren Bacall and with Martin Scorsese, and dining with Jacques Chirac, always with his wife of forty-four years, Veronique Passani, beside him. Throughout, Peck is informal, candid, and wry.
Read More »

Jacques Demy followed up The Umbrellas of Cherbourg with another musical about missed connections and second chances, this one a more effervescent confection. Twins Delphine and Solange, a dance instructor and a music teacher (played by real-life sisters Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac), long for big-city life; when a fair comes through their quiet port town, so does the possibility of escape. With its jazzy Michel Legrand score, pastel paradise of costumes, and divine supporting cast (George Chakiris, Grover Dale, Danielle Darrieux, Michel Piccoli, and Gene Kelly), The Young Girls of Rochefort is a tribute to Hollywood optimism from sixties French cinema’s preeminent dreamer.
Read More »

The story of Colonel Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the Enola Gay, the bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Although unaware of the full potential of this new weapon, he knows that it is capable of doing tremendously more damage than any other weapon used before, and that the death toll resulting from it will be enormous. He is reluctant to be the person who will end so many lives, but if using it may bring an end to the war, then not doing so may result in even more lives being lost in continued ground assaults as the fighting goes on. At the same time, the intense secrecy surrounding this mission leaves him with no one he can express his thoughts and doubts to, not even his wife. As time goes on, the pressure upon him only increase.
Read More »

After Flamenco (1995) and Tango (1998) – nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, in 2005 Carlos Saura completes his trilogy on modern urban song with Fados. After over two years of research into the subject, Carlos Saura takes an enormous step forward in his approximation to music. If, in his earlier musicals, Iberia, Flamenco, Tango…, he based his work on dancing, in Fados he makes a special effort with the plot and image to reflect the birth of a suburban, dockland music which is in itself a synthesis of all of the music born towards the end of the 19th century.
Read More »

Kalu is a taxi-driver in Bombay, India. He has two women who love him and would like to marry him. Kalu first wants to establish himself, and become rich, before he can even think of marriage. One of the women who loves him, has a father who is involved in gangster-type activities, and would like Kalu also to join him so that he can get rich soon. Kalu has now to decide to become rich quick or sleep better.
Read More »

The Kobayashi family finally get the chance to move out of their tiny, cramped Tokyo apartment in favour of the suburban house of their dreams. But all is not well: the house is infested by termites and the family starts cracking up: Son Masaki is studying so obsessively for his exams that he’s losing his mind; daughter Erika is oblivious of all but her forthcoming record company audition, grandfather Yasukuni starts getting World War II flashbacks and father Katsuhiko is so worried about his family’s “sickness” that he thinks can only be cured by group suicide…
Read More »

Étienne Ranson is the black sheep of his family. Having made his fortune in Tunisia, he returns to France and receives a cool reception from his uncle, Achille Guéroy, the owner of a glove factory in Grenoble. Guéroy is astounded when his nephew returns the money he had lent him and immediately looks at Étienne in a new light when it becomes apparent that he is now a very wealthy man. However, when Ranson is arrested for his involvement in a bloody riot in Tunisia, the family is quick to disown him again. When the charges against him are dropped, Ranson returns to Grenoble and intervenes to end a strike at the factory. Ranson then learns that his cousin Jacques has lost the company’s entire cash reserves through high-risk speculation. Aware that the Guéroys face ruin and dishonour, Ranson agrees to bail them out, on one condition: that he can marry his adopted cousin Geneviève. But she is already engaged to another man…
Read More »