American reporter Mark English attempts to get an exposé on how magician/hypnotist The Great Vorelli manages his stage illusions, but is foiled when Vorelli sets his attention on English’s girlfriend Marianne Horn. Vorelli’s dummy Hugo seems to have a mind of its own, and the ability to walk … and for reasons that Mark can’t get anyone to believe, even after Vorelli puts Marianne in a coma-like trance.
Tag: UK
Set in Antwerp, Belgium in the early 70s, Left Luggage tells the story of Chaja, an impetuous, liberal-minded philosophy student. She has a complex relationship with her parents, who both survived the Nazi concentration camps. She needs money so she gets a job as a nanny for a Hassidic Jewish family whose world is completely alien to her liberated lifestyle. She becomes close to their son and through this relationship learns about the lives of her own parents.
A portrait of film critic Manny Farber, featuring interviews with Farber and art critic Dave Hickey, as well as inventively displayed clips of the films that Farber discusses.
Documentary about the influential pop composer and record producer Joe Meek, who died in dramatic circumstances in 1967 after a bizarre childhood and a career, often controversial, which spanned the period from the mid-50s to the rise of the Beatles in the 60s. At the end of his life he was suffering from paranoid delusions that people were watching him through walls. Alan Lewens’ film charts an Ortonesque tale of post-war Britain.
This densely-packed film is based on a book by Tom Hart about the struggles of a young Yorkshire boy trying to come to grips with squabbling parents, a doctor who wants to institutionalize him because of his epilepsy, and a mother who refuses to accept that he is different in any way.
This satirical fantasy is based upon an Elmer Rice play from 1923. A hard-working office employee is rewarded for his years of slavish devotion to the company by getting fired just prior to retirement and being replaced with an adding machine. Now, with only his nagging wife waiting at home to add more misery to his dreary life, the man has nothing left and goes over the edge.
Filmed in India, Rumer Godden’s story has been adapted and directed by the Jewel in the Crown team. Two English schoolgirls arrive in New Delhi, 1959. Their diplomat father has secured them a beautiful Eurasian governess. 15-year-old Una suspects an ulterior motive. But her father’s affairs take second place to her own when she has a secret affair with the Indian gardener.