rarefilmm | The Cave of Forgotten Films Posts

August 18, 2020 / Comedy

——UPGRADED——

David Kolowitz, a nice young man living with his parents in New York City in 1938, works at a machine repair shop. His parents want David to study to become a pharmacist. But what he really wants is to be an actor like his idol, Ronald Colman. One day, at his friend Marvin’s suggestion, David tries out for a part in a play, and gets it, despite his obvious lack of acting experience (not to mention ability). To play his part, David must come up with his own costume – a tuxedo – and pay the house five dollars a week, ostensibly for tuition. But it is David’s first acting job, one which calls for him to “enter laughing.” And if it doesn’t work out – well, there’s always pharmacy school.

June 12, 2019 / Documentary

——UPGRADED——

For one week, Eduardo Coutinho and his team talked to 27 residents in an enormous building in Copacabana. Amongst these are a middle-aged couple who met through the classified ads in a newspaper, a call-girl who keeps her daughter and her sister, a retired actor, an ex-football player, and a janitor who suspects that his adopted father, whom he dreams about every night, is his real father. The subject of this documentary is private life in the big city, apartments as a last stronghold of individuality, in addition to emphasizing the fact that to live together in one and the same place does not ensure that a community will be formed.

November 10, 2018 / Drama
October 13, 2024 / Horror

Having been adopted by the madam of a southwestern brothel, a now adult Adrian must cope with the fact that he’s Satan’s kid, and not living up to his expectations. Sequel to Roman Polanski’s 1968 film but unlike the original, this one has little connection with the novel the first film was based on.

October 13, 2024 / Arthouse
October 13, 2024 / Drama
October 7, 2024 / Silent

Unrivaled among silent-film adaptations of Charles Dickens novels are the four epic Danish features for Nordisk Films by its leading director, A.W. Sandberg: Our Mutual Friend (1921), Great Expectations (1922), David Copperfield (1922), and Little Dorrit (1923). The most visually spectacular is Our Mutual Friend, from Dickens’s last completed novel (1864-65), combining a comic satire about greed with a dark mystery that opens as a corpse floats in the Thames. Shot in 1918—the delayed release apparently due to disputes between Sandberg and Nordisk over the film’s ambition and length—its two parts survive only with significant missing footage in the second half, but it still runs almost two-and-a-half hours. Available for the first time with English subtitles that draw on Dickens’s phrasing and with new text screens to fill in missing story information, the forgotten film proves to be one of the great silent literary adaptations.

October 7, 2024 / Short

Ten-year-old Adan lives a carefree life in the rural town of Palmarejo, Puerto Rico, in the late 1950’s, surrounded by his friends, his caring mother, Lilliam, and his beloved pet goat, Chivo. His father, Pablo, returns home from New York City after a brief absence, bringing good news that he has found employment there and announcing he will be moving the family to the distant city immediately. Although Adan initially thinks the trip will be fun and exciting, he discovers that he cannot take Chivo along with him. With the help of his childhood friend, Denise, Adan embarks on a quest to find a new home for his goat…

October 7, 2024 / Documentary

Renowned folk singing group The Weavers plans and performs a reunion concert at Carnegie Hall in 1980, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of their first public concert in 1955 at Carnegie Hall, after being blacklisted. The film covers the group’s political and musical background, their overnight success and blacklisting, and their influence on the 1960’s American folk music movement, including interviews with performers Peter, Paul and Mary, Arlo Guthrie, Don McLean, Holly Near and journalist Studs Terkel.

October 7, 2024 / Documentary

John Korty’s first film is a short documentary made for the Quakers (with whom he fulfilled his service as a conscientious objector to war) about a peace march. Toward the end of his career Korty called it his most personal film.

October 7, 2024 / Drama

Ken Park focuses on several teenagers and their tormented home lives. Shawn seems to be the most conventional. Tate is brimming with psychotic rage; Claude is habitually harassed by his brutish father and coddled, rather uncomfortably, by his enormously pregnant mother. Peaches looks after her devoutly religious father, but yearns for freedom. They’re all rather tight, or so they claim.