A film musical in which every line is sung. The frame is about workers during a strike. They also prepare and perform a demonstration. Two personal relations develop against this background. François abandons his pregnant girlfriend Violette. She feels treated even more unjust when he tries to defend and excuse his behaviour. He had met a very beautiful over-class girl, Edith, and both were immediately overwhelmed by genuine and reciprocal passion. Edith lived in a very unsatisfactory marriage. She was the daughter of the widow from which François rented his room. Nevertheless, he met her in the street, where she just opened her fur coat and was starch naked under it. They will be together in great passion for just one night and day. At the demonstration François is shot by the police and dies in Edith’s arms. – The music is closer to opera than in any other film musical by Jacques Demy. But the greatest difference is that he has devoted much more effort to the task of instructing the…
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Twilight’s Last Gleaming (1977) Robert Aldrich, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Roscoe Lee Browne, Sci-Fi, Thriller
A renegade USAF general, Lawrence Dell, escapes from a military prison and takes over an ICBM silo near Montana and threatens to provoke World War 3 unless the President reveals details of a secret meeting held just after the start of the Vietnam War between Dell and the then President’s most trusted advisors.
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Until They Sail (1957) Robert Wise, Jean Simmons, Paul Newman, Joan Fontaine, Drama, Romance, War
Four sisters in New Zealand fall for four U.S. soldiers en route to the Pacific theater in WWII.
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La pasión según Berenice / The Passion of Berenice (1976) Jaime Humberto Hermosillo, Pedro Armendáriz Jr., Martha Navarro, Blanca Torres, Drama, Thriller
Berenice (Navarro) is a woman with a mysterious past. A scar crosses her face and nightmares of fire and horses fill her lonely nights. She maybe killed her husband but nobody can be sure. In the present, Berenice lives with her godmother (Roldán) a money lender so fragile that she’s always resting in her bed. The two women live in an almost perpetual seclusion, except on Sundays when they go to the church and to the movies. One day, the godmother’s doctor dies and she asks Berenice to go to his velatory. There they meet Rodrigo (Armendáriz Jr.) the doctor’s son, a handsome and free-spirited young man for whom Berenice falls in love.
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Le grand Meaulnes / The Wanderer (1967) Jean-Gabriel Albicocco, Brigitte Fossey, Jean Blaise, Alain Libolt, Drama, Romance
Rural France, the 1890s. Always in motion, Augustin wanders three times. First, as a youth, while a boarder near Bourges, he’s lost in the woods and finds a chateau where an engagement party’s in progress: there he falls eternally in love with Yvonne and she with him. Back at school, he hears she is in Paris, so he follows in a vain search and meets a woman, jilted by her lover. In the countryside a few year’s later, Augustin’s friend François finds Yvonne and brings Augustin to her. They marry, but the next day, Augustin leaves to fulfill a youthful promise he made to Yvonne’s brother. François comforts the pregnant Yvonne as they await Augustin’s return.
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Nora-neko rokku: Onna banchô / Stray Cat Rock: Delinquent Girl Boss (1970) Yasuharu Hasebe, Akiko Wada, Meiko Kaji, Kôji Wada, Action, Crime, Drama
Tells the story of Mei, leader of an all-girl biker gang, inadvertently gets involved with a yakuza group’s plot to rig boxing matches because of her boyfriend and a rival gang. When the yakuza tortures and kills some of her members, she comes out of hiding and, with the help of a loner named Ako, seeks revenge.
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Ziegfeld Girl (1941) Robert Z. Leonard, Busby Berkeley, James Stewart, Judy Garland, Hedy Lamarr, Drama, Musical, Romance
Discovery by Flo Ziegfeld changes a girl’s life but not necessarily for the better, as three beautiful women find out when they join the spectacle on Broadway: Susan, the singer who must leave behind her ageing vaudevillian father; vulnerable Sheila, the working girl pursued both by a millionaire and by her loyal boyfriend from Flatbush; and the mysterious European beauty Sandra, whose concert violinist husband cannot endure the thought of their escaping from poverty by promenading her glamor in skimpy costumes.
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Diaboliquement vôtre / Diabolically Yours (1967) Julien Duvivier, Alain Delon, Senta Berger, Peter Mosbacher, Crime, Drama, Thriller
After a near fatal car crash and three weeks in a coma, a man awakens to a new life, attempting to search for his true identity after suffering amnesia. The more he remembers, the more dangerous it gets.
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Gauragangur (2010) Gunnar B. Gudmundsson, Hildur Berglind Arndal, Edda Arnljótsdóttir, Sigurbjartur Atlason, Comedy
The time is 20 years and a few months to the millennium, and the unrecognized, self-proclaimed genius Orm Odins has to deal with the age-old existentialist dilemma that is teenage hood…
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La bûche / Season’s Beatings (1999) Danièle Thompson, Sabine Azéma, Emmanuelle Béart, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Comedy, Drama
Christmas, family, and infidelity. Yvette’s husband has died, and her grown daughters join her at the grave: Sonia, wealthy, bourgeois, and generous; Louba, living with their dad Stanislas, singing at a Russian restaurant, penniless, the mistress for the past 12 years of a man who will never leave his wife; Milla, the youngest, acerbic, lonesome. Christmas was when they learned their parents were divorcing 25 years ago. Over the next few days, yuletide depression, Louba’s pregnancy, Sonia’s crumbling marriage, Stanislas’s overtures to Yvette, and Milla’s attraction to the man who’s her father’s rent-free lodger lead each one to re-examine self, family, and hopes. Is renewal possible?
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