This heartwarming British drama is based on Beth the Sheepdog, a novel by Ernest Lewis. Beth is played, quite well indeed, by a magnificent animal named Fleet. The story concerns the efforts of various interested human parties to enter Beth in the All-England Dog Championship. When a farmer is unsuccessful in his efforts to purchase Beth for his own, he spitefully accuses the dog’s owner of sheep stealing. After this mess is straightened out, the plot segues into the Championship, and it is at this point that the film finally comes to life.
Category: Drama
A thoughtful and emotionally challenging look at the lives of two children living in modern day Afghanistan, STRAY DOGS lifts the lid on what it is like living in the country, post-Taliban. The film focuses on a young brother and sister who are forced to share their incarcerated mother’s prison cell by night, but roam the streets during the day. For they are homeless; only allowed to stay within the prison’s confines after dark, the children are not permitted there during the day. Fed up with having to fend for themselves, and in a desperate bid to get locked up on a more permanent basis, the siblings concoct a cunning plan; using American cinema as a guide, they begin to perform robberies on the streets of Kabul.
The first of Kawashima’s Daiei Studio collaborations with Wakao centers on the life of a Tokyo geisha named Koen and her relationships with various men. Starting out with no singing or dancing talents, the young, free-spirited Koen is initially eager to please and happy to do what she is told. With time and experience, however, she gradually begins to notice a change in herself and questions what she wants out of life. Played with subtle shifts in emotion, Wakao’s delicate performance earned her the Kinema Junpo Award and Blue Ribbon Award for Best Actress.
A man who has worked his whole life to become wealthy is determined to bring his son up with everything he has never had as a youngster. Needless to say the young lad grows up to be a spoiled brat by the time he reaches college age and wreaks havoc on anyone who stands in his way. In the meantime, his father has fallen in love with a beautiful artist who has his best interest at heart. The problem is that the son also develops feelings for her. This film was adapted form the popular Howard Spring novel.
The hero is Toshio Kanbe, a middle-aged salaryman with a typical family (wife, two teenage children), living quietly in a provincial city (Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture), who wakes up one morning in the summer of 1994 to find himself the prime suspect in the biggest mass-murder case of the decade. Someone, somehow, released clouds of poison gas that killed seven and sickened nearly 600 people in his apartment building and neighborhood.
In its sixty-five minutes, Paz Encina’s first film, carries Ramón and Cándida, an aging couple living in the deep country, from sunrise, when they hang their old hammock between two trees in a clearing, to sunset, when they take it in. Settled in its tenuous grasp, they talk about the heat, the rain, the dog that won’t stop barking, the war, and their son, Máximo, who is doing his military service and hasn’t been heard from lately. The father lives in hope, the mother in fear, and scenes of their daily rounds of labor and rest—images of a contemplative pictorial exaltation—are joined by voice-over flashbacks revealing the story of their son’s departure and the rumors that followed.
Rick Morgan, an American involved in the bootlegging trade, is forced to relocate to Britain where he becomes one of the top cat burglars in London. One night while breaking into a house he runs into the daughter of its occupant Glory Fane and they soon fall in love. However, one of Morgan’s old associates from the United States, now masquerading as a respectable member of British society, threatens to wreck his chances of going straight and finding happiness with Glory.