Harvey and Gillian Fairchild face a very difficult weekend. Harvey, celebrating his 60th birthday, is stressed and depressed. Gillian is awaiting the results of a throat biopsy. Their lives are further complicated by their three grown children, a ditsy neighbor, a fortune teller, and an alcoholic priest.
Category: Drama
Set in Hamburg’s “Hell’s Kitchen,” a waterfront milieu of gangsters, pimps, dealers and prostitutes, the story follows the attempts of an ex-seaman first to insinuate himself into the scene, and then to extricate himself from it. He becomes a small-time pimp, sending his naive girlfriend out onto the streets thinking she is financing their middle-class future. When he becomes involved with an old pal, Nil, he increases his criminal portfolio. But when he steals Nil’s girlfriend and things heat up, he leaves for his sister’s middle-class home in Berlin, where his attempts to fit in are doomed from the start. Returning to Hamburg, he starts a rapid decline that delivers him into the waiting arms of Nil, whose revenge is merciless.
——UPGRADED——
Two sisters, Amanda, 11, and Laurel, 16, run away from their different foster parents, sleeping in model homes, or wherever they can. But when Laurel becomes pregnant, they find they can’t make it through this crisis on their own. With nowhere else to turn, they decide to kidnap Elaine, a clerk in a baby supply store. But Elaine seems to need Manny and Lo just as much as they need her.
José Manuel Alcántara is a playwright of about fifty years. Because of the failure of his last work, or perhaps due to the abandonment of his wife, he decides to leave Madrid and settle in a city on the seashore. There he lives quietly, dedicated to his collaborations in radio and press. But suddenly, the “mistakes of the past” appear again. His son, singer and rock songwriter, appears suddenly, not to settle accounts, but for something bolder. An actress who was in love emerges one day in the theatrical billboards of the city. And her friend Lola will pose problems of compound interest to José Manuel.
Guy Montgomery is a male prostitute and on the run. Desperately trying to escape his tragic and sometimes violent past. After being drugged and abused by a famous actress and her husband, he awakens to a surge of pain and anger which erupts, stopping only with the death of the husband – or so he believes.
The film, Emitai, is the story of the silent resistance among a Diola tribe in West Africa in early World War II. Desiring a strong army, the French tear through villages rallying up men to be transported to France while leaving the women behind to tend to children and the elderly. The tension between the army and villagers grow when the French demand access to their rice crop. The village resistance ends in violence and uproar because rice is not only essential but also sacred to the village.
In the decades preceding World War II, American diplomat Alex Hazen watches the rise of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler but does not use any of his ambassadorial powers to intervene. Instead, Hazen subscribes to the dominant policy of appeasement, believing the belligerent dictators will eventually soften. Although married, he is in love with journalist Cassie Bowwman — but her feelings about the threat posed by fascism differs severely from his.
“Ciske de Rat” belongs to dickensean model “little man’s hard life” and tells a deceptively simple story about a boy in modern Netherlands. Persecution, loneliness, adults’ hostility, fear, mixture of obstinacy and tenderness, and even an imprisonment. Excellent camera movement and delicate portraying of Ciske’s fragile soul put this film out of merely historical context and ensure the place in the Great Cinema History for it.