David Gladwell (Requiem for a Village) was just 20 years old when he made A Summer Discord, an imaginative amateur, silent short film set in the countryside which tells the story of a little girl who is reprimanded by her mother. Of particular note is the film’s dark nightmare sequence which is shot in colour (unlike the rest of the film) and which anticipates Gladwell’s later, highly poetical films.
Tag: UK
Young Anoop, on a school camping trip, unexpectedly ends up adopting a baby elephant from a circus pitched nearby. He and his friends team up with a concerned clown to prevent the pachyderm being sent away with a mean businessman and his silly son, who want to take it abroad. This charmingly old-school circus comedy for kids is full of fast and furious fun.
During the Cold War, the chief of a British intelligence code-breaking section falls in love with a new employee and shields an old co-worker, accused of Communist affiliations, from the wrath of the security branch.
Two accident-prone plumbers go to fix the plumbing at a home for retired gentle-folk on the coldest day of the year in Finland. Everything that can go wrong for these plumbers goes wrong.
British farmer Mark Warrow and his hot-tempered wife, Martha, have a loveless marriage that reaches its breaking point when Martha shoots Mark’s beloved dog. In a rage, Mark murders Martha. On the run following his crime, Mark meets Jo Trent, a seemingly naïve woman who offers him a lift; in fact, she recognizes Mark as the man the police are chasing and is gathering material for a book called “I Met A Murderer” about their time together.
The very first full-length documentary on Scorsese offers an invaluable look at how he was perceived by his colleagues, and himself, in 1977. Catching Scorsese while while he was in post-production on New York, New York and editing The Last Waltz, British filmmaker Peter Hayden gets the manically hyper Scorsese to comment on his youth, his relation to his lead characters, and most importantly, his approach to direction. The doc doesn’t quite move at the pace of Scorsese’s revved-up speed-talking, but it does offer some real insight into his productivity in the 1970s, thanks to an impressive array of talking heads. Included are Scorsese’s collaborators Jay Cocks, Mardik Martin, Brian De Palma, Steven Prince (who co-produced this doc), and his mentor John Cassavetes. Also the performers, who discuss his working methods in detail — Jodie Foster, Liza Minnelli, and, of course, Robert De Niro.
During New Year’s Eve a young model spends the day searching for her grandmother who has suspiciously gone missing.
Krzysztof Kieslowski is the foremost director to have emerged in Poland since Andrzej Wadja. His two most recent features, A Short Film About Killing and A Short Film About Love, shocked Western audiences and critics with their pessimism and brutality. Shot during the final months of communist rule, they are actually two in an extraordinary cycle of films made for Polish television. Each uses one of the Ten Commandments to explore the morality of Polish society; their subjects range from suicide to stamp-collecting, from incest to home computers. Arena talks to Kieslowski about these parables of contemporary life, and his role as a modern-day Moses.