Irrestisible charm and talent help Serge Alexandre alias Stavisky, small-time swindler, to make friends with even the most influential members of the French industrial and political elite during the early ’30s. But nothing lasts forever and when his great scam involving hundreds millions of francs gets exposed, the result is an unprecedented scandal that almost caused a civil war.
Category: Biography
Austrian soldier Klaus Schneider is shot in the head during combat in World War I. As he recovers under the watch of Dr. Bettleheim, Schneider discovers he has the ability to read minds and see the future. Renaming himself Erik Jan Hanussen, he uses his new abilities to make money in Germany as a mind reader. Soon, Hanussen predicts the rise of Hitler and World War II, which raises his profile while also endangering his life.
The film follows the life of the celebrated Austrian composer Johann Strauss Jr. — the “Waltz King” — from his early struggles to his ultimate triumph. It begins in 1840s Vienna, where Strauss’s father, Johann Strauss Sr., is a dominant orchestra-leader and expects his son to follow a conventional path rather than compose or conduct.
In this biopic set in 16th-century Spain, the famed Italian painter El Greco journeys to Toledo, Spain to paint an altarpiece. Trouble ensues when he falls in love with a beautiful local girl. It is she who warns him that the Inquisition is gathering evidence against him.
The Swedish 19th century engineer S. A. Andrée sets out to become the first man on the north pole. His idea is to launch a polar expedition using a hydrogen balloon, together with two friends. The balloon, “The Eagle”, takes off from Svalbard in 1897, but the three men are not heard of again.
Piaf is a play by Pam Gems that focuses on the life and career of French chanteuse Edith Piaf. This biographical drama with music portrays the singer in as a self-destructive, promiscuous alcoholic and junkie who, in one controversial scene, urinates in public.
In this masterpiece of contemplative cinema by Spain’s Víctor Erice (The Spirit of the Beehive), the painter Antonio López attempts, as he has many times before, to capture the play of light on the leaves of the quince tree in his garden, and discovers something eternal in the process.
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Hanna’s War is the true story of Hanna Senesh, a Hungarian-Jewish WW2 resistance fighter, who would become Israel’s “Joan of Arc”. As a young person, she fled Nazi-occupied Hungary for Palestine, where she was recruited and trained by the British to serve as a commando. After completing her training in Britain, she parachutes into Yugoslavia with a commando team to establish escape routes across the Hungarian-Yugoslavian border for downed British pilots. Her attempts to save Hungarian Jews in Nazi-occupied Hungary, however, leads to her capture, torture and demise at the hands of the Gestapo and the Nazi-controlled Hungarian police.