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.
Tag: 1990s
In a slightly future America, a woman goes to the big city to visit with her sister, who is dead in her apartment. In order to find out what happened to her sister, she gets a job working at a dance club, a lower notch in the strip joint circuit. Some of her colleagues begin showing up dead as she uncovers a sinister hierarchy in the strip club management that is harnessing the sexual activity for their own twisted ends.
Miyashita, a former low-level yakuza member, has tracked down and kidnapped his daughter’s murderer with help of his friend Nijima. But others are soon implicated in the death, leading the pair further down a violent path of revenge.
Alfie Byrne is a middle-aged bus conductor in Dublin in 1963. He would appear to live a life of quiet desperation: he’s gay, but firmly closeted, and his sister is always trying to find him “the right girl”. His passion is Oscar Wilde, his hobby is putting on amateur theatre productions in the local church hall. We follow him as he struggles with temptation, friendship, disapproval, and the conservative yet oddly lyrical world of Ireland in the early 1960s.
Dr. Edward Blis, Jr, a chiropractor by day, moonlights as a professional wrestler at night. His wrestling name is the Naked Man and he wears a naked body suit when wrestling. After his parents are killed by Sticks Varona, a cripple with crutches which double asmachine guns, and an Elvis Presley impersonator, he loses his sanity. He adopts the persona of his wrestling character and goes on a rampage of revenge.
M/OTHER centers on a seemingly stable relationship at the moment when it starts to come apart. Tetsuro, owner of a chain of elegant, loss-making restaurants, is recently divorced; his ex-wife has custody of their eight-year-old son, Shun. Tetsuro now cohabits with a younger woman, Aki, a graphic designer. When Shun comes to stay for several weeks (his mother is in hospital with a broken leg), Aki finds herself cast as his surrogate-mother– or is it that she unconsciously casts herself in the role, to measure herself against the absent ex-wife?
Fernard Bornard, the director of the botanical gardens of Paris, is deeply haunted by his fear of suffering and death. When Fernand’s son is brutally killed by the Nazis, he brings his grand daughter Philippine to live with him. Out of love for her, he leads her to believe that her father is still alive as a hero of the resistance by disguising himself as this war hero.