As part of a television series devoted to Europe’s major cities, Angelopoulos was commissioned to make this film about Athens. Although much of Angelopoulos’ cinema is set among the villages of the northern countryside, he was born and raised in the city, so this film finds the director musing on an Athenian past that is variously ancient, national and personal, as well as clips from the “history” films The Travelling Players, The Hunters and Alexander the Great.
Year: 2021
This children’s adventure is set in South Africa and chronicles the bond between a boy and his cheetah. The two have been pals for a long time, so when the cat is taken and placed in a traveling circus, the boy does all he can to free it.
A lawman on the brink of retirement resolves to bring a gang of outlaws to justice first – but the bandits are led by his adoptive father. The townsfolk he protects question where his loyalties lie, and turn to a hired gun to make sure he goes through with the job.
Death of Yazdgerd, is a poetic and political work exploring the cruel and tragic dynamics of a class-based society. War is raging. King Yazdgerd’s body is discovered in a run-down mill in the Iranian desert. Charged with murder, the miller, his wife and his sickly daughter must tell their story to the commanders to escape torture and death. Who killed the King? Was Yazdgerd indeed the revered God-King, or a puny, immoral man caught in the destructive whirlwind of his times?
In the village of Tankuy, farmers are roused to revolutionary action against US based imperialism after one of them, an indigenous man, is brutalized by a landowner. Native non professionals contributed to and helped direct this example of radical, collective oriented Latin American filmmaking.
Assemblage is an experimental film that shows Merce Cunningham’s dance company performing in a public square in the San Francisco bay. Through special effects, the bodies of the dancers appear superimposed against the architecture of the plaza. Colorized by artist Charles Atlas and with a soundtrack created by John Cage, David Tudor, and Gordon Mumma, Assemblage is a psychedelic collage of movement, time, and space.
British farmer Mark Warrow and his hot-tempered wife, Martha, have a loveless marriage that reaches its breaking point when Martha shoots Mark’s beloved dog. In a rage, Mark murders Martha. On the run following his crime, Mark meets Jo Trent, a seemingly naïve woman who offers him a lift; in fact, she recognizes Mark as the man the police are chasing and is gathering material for a book called “I Met A Murderer” about their time together.
The very first full-length documentary on Scorsese offers an invaluable look at how he was perceived by his colleagues, and himself, in 1977. Catching Scorsese while while he was in post-production on New York, New York and editing The Last Waltz, British filmmaker Peter Hayden gets the manically hyper Scorsese to comment on his youth, his relation to his lead characters, and most importantly, his approach to direction. The doc doesn’t quite move at the pace of Scorsese’s revved-up speed-talking, but it does offer some real insight into his productivity in the 1970s, thanks to an impressive array of talking heads. Included are Scorsese’s collaborators Jay Cocks, Mardik Martin, Brian De Palma, Steven Prince (who co-produced this doc), and his mentor John Cassavetes. Also the performers, who discuss his working methods in detail — Jodie Foster, Liza Minnelli, and, of course, Robert De Niro.