A soporific adaptation of The Awakening, Kate Chopin’s proto-feminist, turn-of-the-century novel about a Kentucky-born wife and mother of two whose summer season on Grand Isle with her husband’s easy-going Creole friends frees her from inhibitions. Courted by the young Robert, she finds herself through swimming, unrequited love, painting and other unconventional behaviour.
Category: Drama
The pop-star leads from Hou’s first feature, Cute Girl, are reunited in the director’s follow-up, a brisk work of bubble-gum romance that begins to experiment with the rules of the genre. This time, Taiwanese singing sensation Feng Fei-fei plays Hsing-hui, a trendy photographer visiting a seaside village in Penghu with her successful boss/fiancé. When she happens upon a flute-playing medic blinded in an ambulance crash (Kenny Bee), sparks fly, songs are sung, and she’s left with the tough decision of who to say “I do” to. Despite the eye-rolling premise, Hou infuses the film with enough formal ingenuity (long takes, telephoto lenses, on-location shooting) that a case can be made for its auteurial significance.
In 1650, a group of Brazilian slaves revolt and escape from their sugar plantation to the depths of the jungle, where they join other runaways. Under the leadership of Ganga Bumba, the men are able to carve out a place to live, repelling attempts by their Portuguese masters to recapture them. The community is further strengthened by the return of Zumbi, kidnapped from them as a child, who comes back to command their military.
The film takes place decades after the Falklands War between Argentina and the United Kingdom for the control of the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic Ocean. It tells of Fabián Stratas, a magician and stand-up comedian from Buenos Aires, who saves his money from weddings, birthdays, and bar mitzvahs, and uses a hidden camera to document a week-long trip to the Falkland Islands, which he calls “Fuckland”. He plans to impregnate an islander, reasoning that if only 500 Argentines did the same each year, the islands would soon be overrun with half-Argentines, and he would be the head of a “sexual invasion.”
In this exciting action film, a young Indy driver endeavors to emulate his famous father, and restore his dad’s good reputation after he was killed in a racing in an accident caused by ruthless racketeers who made it look as if the veteran driver was drunk. The young son is assisted by trucker and racing aficionado Blake who helps him defeat the crooks that are trying to kill him too.
When the police discover that their motorcycles are concealing heroin, Waco and his motorcycle gang hides out in a desert convent. A highway patrolman hunts down the gang after they kidnap a nun, Sister Anna and flee the convent. Soon Waco and the young nun fall in love and she is forced to decide whether or not to leave the church for him.
Cageman is a focused social critique of a uniquely Hong Kong phenomenon: in this city with the world’s most unequal wealth and income gap, many unfortunate middle-aged men can’t afford the most basic lodging, and live in low-rent cages inside squalid tenements. Cageman is a microcosm of Hong Kong, where most citizens must live squeezed into incredibly dense neighbourhoods, prey to monopolistic ‘tycoons’ – the (Chinese government-supporting) land-owning billionaire class – while nevertheless enjoying a way of life that, despite its frictions, forges a uniquely communal, indomitable ‘spirit of Lion Rock’.
Gang Leader Dutch Malone goes on a hunting trip and is in a car wreck and is confined to the hospital, without the knowledge of any of his gang members. District Attorney Brady induces taxidermist Peter Winkly, who is an exact double for Malone,to impersonate Dutch and assume leadership of the gang. Winkly “takes over” the gang and only Rita, Dutch’s girl friend, has any suspicion that he is not really Dutch. But Dutch sees a newspaper showing him out on the town, escapes from the hospital and is on his way to look up the impostor.