Dariush Mehrjui’s Hamoun is a psychological comedy/drama about a bumbling Iranian intellectual, Hamid Hamoun. Trying and failing to complete a philosophical tract on love, Hamoun cannot seem to convince his wife Mashid, who is a successful artist, to love him either. Hamoun’s refusal to accept reality, or grant Mashid a divorce, is both character study and metaphor for a condition of modern urban life in Iran.
Author: Jon W.
With fast changing visuals and moods, an artist presents his family’s twentieth-century story. Although Stalin’s sour image is in the background, a boy’s childhood is a dreamlike world of colors and a butterfly. War interrupts youth and romance. Hitler, concentration camps, and conflagration finally give way to a mother and child (father is missing in the war), birds, beauty and more butterflies. The child grows. Pop culture arrives from America, but the grim shadow of Stalinism remains. The artist leaves to study in the West. Art, animation, sex, and love nourish him. He earns a diploma!
After she enters the United States illegally, 15-year-old Polish singer Katri Walenska finds herself under the wing of aspiring singer Terry Brennan. Soon Terry has Katri booked on a TV talent show — but her immigration status may cause a problem. This musical classic boasts a host of famous performers, including Metropolitan Opera star Lauritz Melchior.
It is the simple story of a group of woodcutters in the Grossetano area with their problems, individual stories, small and big intimate dramas. It is a film with a Rossellini-style realist slant where, without falling into scenicism, the importance of the landscape is combined with the psychological subtlety of the characters and the lucid and critical description of their behaviour.
A fictional account of Orson Welles’ real passage to Brazil where he was supposed to film a cultural film called “It’s All True”, to present a positive image of Brazilian people and the country’s grandiosity’s to the U.S. government, a project that was part of FDR’s Good Neighbor policy. But Welles got enchanted with everything around him and got distracted from the project, that never got fully made. This movie speculates what really happened to Welles that prevented him from fulfilling his work.
Set in 1894, when Oscar Wilde’s close friendship with Bosie Douglas provokes a quarrel with Bosie’s father, Lord Queensberry. Oscar eventually charges Lord Queensberry with criminal libel. However, the libel suit spectacularly backfires. This BBC miniseries charts the steady slide into disrepute of the notable author and playwright, and stars (a very young) Michael Gambon in the title role.
While on a train, a teenage boy thinks about his life and the flamboyant aunt whose friendship acted as an emotional shield from his troubled family. This film evokes the haunting quality of memory while creating a heartfelt portrait of a boy’s life in a rural 1940s Southern town.