After five years working with Roger Corman, Jonathan Demme moved to Paramount to make Citizens Band, a charming ensemble comedy following a disparate group of characters who communicate across the airwaves. A huge influence on Paul Thomas Anderson, the film’s empathy for the outsiders and eccentrics who would characterise Demme’s later work is clearly evident here. And the cast, including Le Mat as a CB vigilante and Napier as a bigamist trucker, is terrific. A prescient study of human behaviour that resonates in our social media era, Citizens Band’s box-office failure left Demme fearing his career was over, but it can now be seen as the moment he found his distinctive voice.
Category: Drama
Piano Solo tells the story of Luca Flores, a brilliant Italian musician. In Florence, Luca graduates with top honors in piano, but his destiny is not to become a classical pianist. He is curious to explore other worlds and meets young jazz enthusiasts who transmit their passion to him. Luca’s great talent, combined with constant practice, leads him to play with the greatest jazz musicians of the time, including Chet Baker. The film not only portrays his professional journey but also explores his loves, struggles, and inner turmoil as a young man who cannot come to terms with the ghosts of his past, ultimately leading to a tragic explosion of madness.
Tired of being mistreated by their husbands, Ema, Clotilde, and Chayo leave their families and begin an adventure that takes them to a cavernous cabaret in Guadalajara, a love affair with a hot-blooded young drug dealer, and a popular, well-decorated Mexican restaurant in downtown L.A. Along the way, the three women find their respective self-esteem and their true reasons for living.
Maicol’s mother Anita is distracted by too many concerns to pay him much mind, so Maicol seeks fulfillment in his inner life, which is very busy and rich. The five year-old has made a world for himself populated by situations and people from the movie Dune, and anything he says to anyone is unlikely to refer to anything else. When his unmarried working mother takes him with her to the train station for her rendezvous with her lover, he occupies himself during their long wait by exploring everything in sight. Unused to dealing with anything but his fantasy life, after he gets himself lost he is of no help to the police in their search for his mother.
White-collar worker Yamashita finds out that his wife has a lover visiting her when he’s away, suddenly returns home and kills her. After eight years in prison, he returns to live in a small village, opens a barber shop (he was trained as a barber in prison) and talks almost to no-one except for the eel he “befriended” in prison. One day he finds the unconscious body of Keiko, who attempted suicide and reminds him of his wife. She starts to work at his shop, but he doesn’t let her become close to him.
A film, like a long poem in which a married couple engage in conversation about love, death, and life while the scenery changes around them. The destiny of each human being plays out between the parallel and antagonistic lines of man and woman, day and night, north and south, black and white. And not knowing what real death will be, we imagine life and death in various ways.
An unemployed man with individualist and pacifist values is inevitably brainwashed by society and the mass media to conform to the dominant ideology and embrace war. His soul is destroyed but his heart cannot be conquered.
This excellent Afrikaans language drama follows the deterioration of an Afrikaner family isolated and shunned in the small community of Toorwater. Nothing seems to happen. Then a circus train loses its way and comes to rest in Toorwater, and a mysterious clown brings fresh magic to the stagnating family, but he also poses a threat to the rest of the community. Katinka Heyns brilliantly succeeds in creating a metaphor for the Afrikaner family’s turbulent emotional, cultural and ideological journey from the darkness of apartheid back into the light of post-apartheid reconciliation (familial, cultural and political))