Author Archives: rarefilm

L’ingorgo: Una storia impossibile / Traffic Jam (1979) Luigi Comencini, Alberto Sordi, Annie Girardot, Fernando Rey, Drama

L'ingorgo Una storia impossibile (1979)
A tremendous congestion hit the Roma highway ring. The biggest traffic jam ever seen endures for more than 36 hours. People blocked in their cars react at the beginning normally. But the more the time advance the more we are witness of personal dramas, hysteric reactions and more. All the episodes are linked like one only plot. Cars and their hosts are a microcosm of stories part of a major universe: the congestion.
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The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1962) Vincente Minnelli, Glenn Ford, Ingrid Thulin, Charles Boyer, Drama, War

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1962)
In Argentina, the family man Julio Madariaga is the patriarch of his family and considers his farm the paradise on Earth. One of his daughters, Luisa Desnoyers, has married the Frenchman immigrant Marcelo Desnoyers and they have one son, the playboy Julio, and one daughter, the gorgeous student of Sorbonne Chi Chi. His other daughter, Elena von Hartrott, has married the German Karl von Hartrott, and they have three sons: Heinrich, Gustav and Franz. In 1938, Heinrich returns from Germany for a family reunion and when he tells that he has joined the SS, the displeased Julio Madariaga has a heart attack and dies. When France is occupied by the Germans, the family reunites in Paris and Franz is the Nazi administrator in France. The alienated Julio has a studio where he paints, and has a love affair with Marguerite Laurier, the wife of the owner of a newspaper Etienne Laurier that is fighting in Belgium. Meanwhile Chi Chi joins the French resistance and is arrested.
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The Karate Killers (1967) Barry Shear, Robert Vaughn, David McCallum, Joan Crawford, Comedy, Crime, Thriller

The Karate Killers (1967)
U.N.C.L.E. agents Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin travel around the globe in an effort to track down a secret formula that was divided into four parts and left by a dying scientist with his four daughters, all of whom live in different countries. Evil THRUSH agent Randolph also wants the formula, and is aided by his karate-chopping henchmen.
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The Pierre Woodman Story / A Pierre Woodman sztori (2009) András Kovács M., Péter Szajki, Documentary, Erotic

The Pierre Woodman Story (2009)
This documentary shows the life of French porn film director and producer Pierre Woodman, who has discovered several dozen Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, and Russian girls for the porn industry; girls who did not have a second though about participating in Pierre’s castings. This French-born entrepreneur and dare-devil is famous and envied for recording his porn movie castings, during which he “tests“ the candidates. Monsieur Woodman is 45 years old and has had 3000 sexual contacts with women so far.
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The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things (2004) Asia Argento, Dylan Sprouse, Cole Sprouse, Drama

The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things (2004)
The dysfunctional twenty-three years old Sarah takes her six year old natural son Jeremiah from the home of his beloved foster parents with the support of the social service to live with her. Along the years, the boy shares her insane and lowlife style and is introduced to booze and drugs and mentally, physically and sexually abused by Sarah, her lovers and her religiously fanatic family.
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Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number! (1966) George Marshall, Bob Hope, Elke Sommer, Phyllis Diller, Comedy

Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number! (1966)
The Divine D.D., a European actress known more for her bubble bath scenes than for her acting, decides she has had enough with bubble baths and wants to be taken seriously as an actress. So much so that she runs away during the middle of a scene while filming in Hollywood and winds up in Oregon. While she is staying in a hotel, the operator accidentally connects her with a real estate agent named Tom Meade. She asks Tom to bring her some food and when he does he suggests that she go to his cabin in the woods. She also asks him not to tell anyone where she is because she doesn’t want to go back to Hollywood. Now Tom must keep the secret, especially from his wife and from his suspicious housekeeper Millie.
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Le Tigre se parfume à la dynamite / An Orchid for the Tiger (1965) Claude Chabrol, Roger Hanin, Margaret Lee, Michel Bouquet, Adventure, Crime, Comedy

Le tigre se parfume a la dynamite (1965)
Louis Rapiere aka Tiger is sent to Port-a-Pitre (French Guyane), to supervise the recuperation of a treasure from a sunken ship. A group of revolutionaries pirates the ship and robs the treasure, intending to sell it to an international terrorist organization, named Orchid. When he gets there, he demands that the French authority arrests the revolutionaries, but trying to prevent a general strike, the police does nothing. The Tiger finds himself acting alone, in a paralized territory – as the revoltionaries incited the people to the general strike anyway… and competing against American, Russian, and German spies. Everybody is very interested in the treasure, a rare mineral with tremendous impact on arms development, now about to fall into the Orchid’s clutch.
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Station / Eki (1981) Yasuo Furuhata, Ken Takakura, Chieko Baishô, Ayumi Ishida, Drama

Station (1981)
A very beautiful film. This is a Ken Takakura vehicle, and as such follows his formula. Takakura plays to type as the laconic brooder who suffers multiple tragedies with manly stoicism. While the variety of his film varied greatly, his films with director Yasuo Furuhata were always of the highest quality, and this is no exception. Takakura is a cop training to be a sharpshooter for the Olympic games, he divorces his wife and abandons his daughter when he discovers she’s had an affair. Later his coach is gunned down by a fleeing criminal. Years later Takakura returns to his snowy hometown and starts an affair with a middle-aged bar owner. The story is a bit thick, with a number of subplots, yet it is extrordinarily melancholic, as Takakura seems to regret everything he’s done in his life and is made over and over again to relive his mistakes. There is very little “action” as such, and no yakuzas of any kind; but beyond that this is one of the most lushly beautiful and emotional films you can see (if you can see it), with an excellent score by Ryudo Uzaki.
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