A dashing, successful writer of lurid romance novels named Robert Harmon (John Cassavetes) arrives home in the middle of the day - still stylishly dressed in formal evening attire - to find an odd assortment of vivacious, attractive young women engaged in frivolous activities as they bide time awaiting his return.
Meanwhile, in another town, Sarah Lawson (Gena Rowlands) enters an empty conference room with her adolescent daughter Debbie (Risa Blewitt) and immediately begins to lavish the girl with presents, her myopic doting only briefly interrupted by the entrance of other people into the room, including her estranged husband Jack (Seymour Cassel). Sarah and Jack have assembled for a meeting with their legal counsel and the presiding judge (Joan Foley) in order to finalize the terms of an increasingly acrimonious divorce.

Based on a play by Ted Allan, Love Streams is a haunting, provocative, and brutally honest examination of love, emotional need, loneliness, and longing. In contrast to the active and confrontational camerawork of his earlier films (most notably in Faces), John Cassavetes creates a spare, muted, and objective portrait, capturing with underlying compassion the empty lives of emotionally adrift characters who act out the ache of their unarticulated despair through incomprehensible, cruel, and often self-destructive acts.

Robert Altman's M*A*S*H is the first major American movie openly to ridicule belief in God—not phony belief; real belief. It is also one of the few (though by no means the first) American screen comedies openly to admit the cruelty of its humor. And it is at pains to blend that humor with more operating room gore than I have ever seen in any movie from any place.
All of which may promote a certain air of good feeling in the audience, an attitude of self-congratulation that they have the guts to take the gore, the inhumanity to appreciate the humor, and the sanity to admire the impiety—directed against a major who prays for himself, his Army buddies, and even "our Commander in Chief."
Based upon a barely passable novel of the same name (the title stands for Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, but "MASH," of course, stands for a few other things as well). M*A*S*H takes place mostly in Korea during the war. However, aside from the steady processing of bloody meat through the operating room, the film is not so much concerned with the war as with life inside the Army hospital unit and especially with the quality of life created by the three hot-shot young surgeons (Donald Sutherland, Elliott Gould, and Tom Skerritt) who make most things happen.
Robert Altman's method has been to fill the frame to a great depth with overlapping bits of action and strands of dialogue. The tracking camera serves as an agent of discovery. To a very great degree, M*A*S*H substitutes field of view for point of view, and although this substitution has a lot to do with the movie's ultimate weakness, the choice is not without its intelligent rewards.

In The Long Goodbye, Robert Altman attempts the impossible and pulls it off.
Using a screenplay by Leigh Brackett, freely adapted from Raymond Chandler's 1953 novel, he has successfully transported Philip Marlowe, Chandler's private eye whose roots are in the depressed, black-and-white 1930's, to the overprivileged, full-color seventies in the person of Elliott Gould.
Gould's Marlowe is entirely different from Humphrey Bogart's (The Big Sleep) and Dick Powell's (Farewell, My Lovely and the 1954 TV adaptation of The Long Goodbye). Gould's Marlowe is not especially tough. He's a bright, conscientious but rather solemn nut, a guy who hopes for the best but expects the worst, having experienced the social upheavals, the assassinations, and the undeclared war of the sixties.
 There are lots of eloquent references to Chandler in Altman's method, which is to pack the screen with more bizarre visual and aural detail than can be easily taken in at one sitting. There are also references in the appreciation of California decor, luxurious as well as tacky, and in the throwaway lines and uniformly excellent characterizations, including two by actors who will surprise you, Nina van Pallandt and Jim Bouton.
The Long Goodbye is not a put-on. It's great fun and it's funny, but it's a serious, unique work.

It's a film that a lot of other directors will wish they'd had the brilliance to make and that dozens of other performers will wish they'd had the great good fortune to be in.
There are so many story lines in Nashville that one is more or less coerced into dealing in abstractions. Nashville is about the quality of a segment of Middle American life. It's about ambition, sentimentality, politics, emotional confusion, empty goals, and very big business in a society whose citizens are firmly convinced that the use of deodorants is next to godliness.
Nashville comes across as a film of enormous feeling. It's compounded of moments that tingle the spine.

Life of Brian tells the tall tale of a peasant boy born the same night as the Christ child -- in an adjoining stable. Laughs mount as their lives increasingly intersect.
Part of the reason the Pythons are so funny is their fearlessness. The only notion they find sacrilegious is the idea that anything might be too sacred to take jabs at. So their preeminently clever humor has fun at the expense of propriety as well as Jewish and Christian concerns, leaving everyone dazzled by their effrontery.
The more things change, the more we have to laugh if we are to have a prayer of remaining sane, and the Pythons are the best possible step in that direction.

In almost every film Federico Fellini has ever made, the sea has occupied a very special place, sometimes as the ultimate barrier between confusion and understanding, sometimes as a kind of vast, implacable presence that dimly recalls protozoan origins. La Strada, La Dolce Vita, and his Satyricon, all end by the edge of the sea.

The film, which uses the director's name in the title to differentiate it from another Italian film based on the same source, is Fellini's adaptation of the satiric novel by Petronius Arbiter, written in the first century a.d. Satyricon has survived in such fragmentary form that all scholars do not necessarily agree whether it is a moral essay or simply a catalogue of the sexual achievements, most of them perverse, of its student-hero, Encolpius, his boy-lover, Giton, who has the constancy of a cloud, and his best friend.

Fellini Satyricon has the form of theater, of ritual, to such a degree that there is no difference between the reality of the film and the reality of a play-within-the-film or of the dryly comic legend of the Widow of Ephesus, which is pictured as it is being told by a storyteller at a sulphurous banquet.

The most spectacular aspect of the film, which is essentially descriptive rather than narrative, is the decor, the color, for everything has been manufactured by Fellini. Like El Greco, Fellini scorns natural sunlight. Even exterior landscapes have been photographed in such a way as to suggest the exotic fraud of the steamy, hermetic interiors. When Encolpius goes to retrieve his beloved Giton, who has been purchased by an actor, you aren't sure for a moment whether he has wandered into life, or into a play, although everyone seems to be speaking Latin and not Italian.

This one's for the mothers and the militants and the ones in between.

Dancers: Kathryn Bosley, Heidi Green, Lizzy Greene, Jordan Marinov, Amanda McCroskery, Candice Thompson

Musicians: Frank Bevan, Bobby Drake, Mia Greene

This one's for the mothers and the militants and the ones in between.

Dancers: Kathryn Bosley, Heidi Green, Lizzy Greene, Jordan Marinov, Amanda McCroskery, Candice Thompson

Musicians: Frank Bevan, Bobby Drake, Mia Greene

A film that screams "product of its time," The Holy Mountain was Alejandro Jodorowsky's dizzying elegy to the sex, drugs and spiritual awakening of the late 1960s and early 1970s -- a suitably bizarre follow-up to his El Topo (1971). Fascinating although it only fitfully makes sense, The Holy Mountain is beautifully shot and designed, and it suggests what might have resulted if Luis Buñuel, Michelangelo Antonioni, and George Romero had all dropped acid and made a movie together. A Christ-like vagrant and thief wanders through a perverse and unfriendly land until he encounters an enlightened one, who gathers the thief and six of the world's most powerful individuals for a spiritual pilgrimage. If that description sounds a bit sketchy, well, narrative isn't this film's strongest suit. But if you want to see the conquest of Mexico re-enacted by reptiles, soldiers shoot innocent people as birds fly from their wounds, and a wizard turn feces into gold, this is the movie for you.

The film is based on Jan Potocki's early 19th-century novel; he wrote to amuse his ailing wife after having finished reading "A Thousand and One Nights" to her. It is very, very 19th-century Polish. It's full of allusions to other languages, other climates, other cultures, other lands and other times, specifically to the Spain of the Inquisition when the Prince of Darkness was as often as not a Moorish maiden without a proper bra or a most convincing, fast-talking Cabalist.

The frame of the film is the journey undertaken by an innocent, Alfons van Worden (the late Zbigniew Cybulski), to join his regiment in Madrid, a trip that takes him through his own dreams and enchantments into the dreams and enchantments of the characters in his fantasies. There are mysterious hermits, two houris who claim to be his first cousins and want to share him as husband, unfaithful wives, wandering lovers, gypsies, a one-eyed man possessed by devils and, as my program notes report with a certain air of exhaustion, "others."

When enough people reach the consensus that laws are unjust, and the government/corporate system doesn’t allow for change, history shows us that the laws will be broken. Every effective social movement, from the civil rights movement, to student uprisings in China, to women’s liberation, has used civil disobedience as a tool.  Is this a permissible tactic, or is this terrorism? Recent federal legislation classifies animal activism as terrorism.

Behind the Mask is a controversial documentary that focuses on the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), direct action, and the current repressive governments to which activists are subject. Director Shannon Keith, an animal rights lawyer, is now under surveillance by the FBI.

Using undercover and underground video shot by the participants, "Behind the Mask" reveals the world of those who choose to break the law in the struggle for the liberation and freedom of animals.

Activists take us through their undercover actions, incarcerations, sacrifice and determination, while exclusive underground footage shows midnight attacks on facilities that torture and kill animals in the name of science and profit. You will see people in white coats with electrical devices doing horrific things to dogs and monkeys that can only be described as torture. You will see people with ski masks and sledgehammers breaking into facilities and freeing those animals.  You will hear from scientists and activists and you will decide who’s right.

Not everyone will agree with what these activists are doing.  While it’s true that some are serving jail terms for “acts of terrorism” such as organizing protests outside fur farms, others are taking it much further.  At once horrifying and uplifting, exhilarating and challenging, this is the story of regular people who risk everything for a cause they believe is just.

Along with Tarkovsky and Dovzhenko, Sergei Paradjanov is one of the most important Soviet directors of last century. Paradjanov, who was periodically jailed and exiled because of his work, stunned world audiences in 1964 with his Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors, popularly known as the Romeo and Juliet of the Carpathians. The film is set among the Hutsul people of the Western Ukraine, an isolated ethnic group who live in the upper reaches of the mountain range. Their lives take place within a harsh environment and an ornate cultural system little changed since the 18th century. The film opens with the deaths of Ivanko's brother, Olexa, crushed by a tree, and father, Pyotr Pavlichuk, killed outside of church by his rich neighbor Guteniuk. During the funeral procession for his father, Ivanko meets Guteniuk's daughter, Marichka, and the stage is set for the star-crossed lovers. Structured episodically, the film checks in with Ivanko and Marichka as they fall in love and age towards adulthood. Finally of an age to marry, Ivanko finds himself unable, having been reduced to poverty by his father's death. Forced to work as a hired hand, he must leave his village and his beloved Marichka. Tragedy ensues and the remainder of the film concerns Ivanko's private and subtle dissolution as a result of this tragedy.

A neurotic housewife, Peggy Gravel (skinny Mink Stole), believes that everyone is out to kill her—especially those kids playing ball outside. Her paranoia knows no bounds. She'd surely have killed her nebbishy and ineffectual husband if her private nurse, a gigantically huge black woman named Grizelda (Jean Hill) didn't sit on him first, smothering him to death.
The law chases them to Mortville, of course. This city looks like Shantytown in Pink Frou-Frous, a Champagne Breakfast with Tod Browning's Freaks. The inhabitants are a motley crew of drag queens, slimy hustlers, old bearded men who stare off into infinity, and trailer trash. God bless 'em, every one.
Say what you will about the content. It's brazenly offensive, offering a thrill every minute. Mole and Muffy offer gross-out flashbacks of their past, which involve wrestling matches and babysitter slayings. We're treated to a sex scene in which skinny little Mink Stole and gargantuan fat-lady Jean Hill, totally nude, roll around in bed. John Waters layers on the raunch, the sick, and the venal with broad strokes.
Again, one must emphasize that the approach is pure camp. It may be gross to some, but John Waters finds an odd, gut-laughing beauty to the entire proceedings. It's imaginative, like a triple-X Flash Gordon show on the planet Mars, complete with operatic costumes in gaudy colors and gigantic papier-mache sets, including a royal palace and a nudist recreation camp. It's a dirty-bird version of The Wizard of Oz.
Desperate living doesn't go as far with breaking taboos as his earlier films and was the last project he did before breaking into some fun mainstream movies, but John Waters has created as vivid a world as ever before or since in Desperate Living. It's his self-proclaimed fairy tale complete with disgusting fairybook villains.
Desperate Living, by contrast, is his most elaborately filthy film, featuring an entire town full of perverts, misfits and psychopaths. Despite Vincent Peranio’s deviously clever production design, Waters’ Mortville is still a concept too grand for the film’s budget, but it’s hard not to love a movie that climaxes with a crazed drag king getting a hideous sex change, severing the offending member and throwing it outside for a passing dog to eat.

At the time it was written, Oscar Wilde’s  Salome was considered so licentious the performance of it was banned, but now it is a rather tame work compared to his more narratively complex comedies, though it does have some lovely poetry. Ken Russell, in a brilliant move, chose to imagine the play being staged for Wilde himself in the 1987 feature. It is depicted as a private performance put on by a wealthy friend of Wilde’s (in a brothel), thus incorporating just enough extraneous detail, decadence and distraction to sustain the work’s power--in essence, while you already know what is going to happen to the characters within the play, you don’t know what will happen to the players themselves. Russell is very faithful to the play’s text (he trimmed just one overlong speech) and while he takes more liberties with Wilde’s biography, he not only conveys the play accurately, he evokes a full sense of Wilde’s life and times, and, by implication, how Wilde’s experiences led to the play’s creation.

"Bad Lieutenant" tells the story of a man who is not comfortable inside his body or soul. He walks around filled with need and dread.
He is in the last stages of cocaine addiction, gulping booze to level off the drug high. His life is such a loveless hell that he buys sex just for the sensation of someone touching him, and his attention drifts even then, because there are so many demons pursuing him.
Harvey Keitel plays this man with such uncompromised honesty that the performance can only be called courageous; not many actors would want to be seen in this light.
The lieutenant has no illusions about himself. He is bad and knows he is bad, and he abuses the power of his position in every way he can.
"Bad Lieutenant" was directed by Abel Ferrara, a gritty New Yorker who has come up through the exploitation ranks ("Ms. 45," "Fear City") to low budget but ambitious films like "China Girl," and "Cat Chaser." This film lacks the polish of a more sophisticated director, but would have suffered from it. The film and the character live close to the streets. The screenplay is by Ferrara and Zoe Lund, who can be seen onscreen as a hooker. They are not interested in plot in the usual sense. There is no case to solve, no crime to stop, no bad guys except for the hero.
"Bad Lieutenant" uses a long string of vivid New York locations without often retracing its steps, and presents a brutal, knowing look at the city's seamy side. A take-it-or-leave-it attitude toward mainstream audiences also gives the film a distinct independent streak. Even its frequent excesses can have a certain panache when viewed with suitable open-mindedness, though such tolerance is not always easily achieved.

Had Pier Paolo Pasolini not died the way he did on Nov. 1, 1975, murdered (the Rome court found) by a 17-year-old boy who repeatedly ran Mr. Pasolini's silver Alfa Romeo over the body in a scrubby vacant lot, I'm not at all sure we'd take the film that became his last work as solemnly as we must.
The young murderer's defense was that he'd become enraged after Mr. Pasolini, who had picked him up several hours earlier near Rome's Termini Station, made homosexual advances. The boy was convicted and sentenced to prison for nine years, seven months and 10 days. Mr. Pasolini, said Michelangelo Antonioni, "was the victim of his own characters."
If Mr. Pasolini really was the victim of his own characters, then his most significant film must be his last, "Salo, 120 Days of Sodom," Mr. Pasolini's transposition of the Marquis de Sade's 18th-century novel to Italy (1944), and the puppet government set up at Salo in northern Italy when Mussolini was briefly free after his rescue by the Nazis from Italian partisans.
Mr. Pasolini, a poet and novelist as well as a film maker, an ardent Marxist who early on had been thrown out of the Communist Party for his homosexuality, made controversial films throughout his career, but none to equal "Salo," which was completed shortly before his death.
De Sade saw his work, about the epic 120-day debauch of four pillars of French society, as a revolutionary act, designed to bring down the old order so that a new one might be established. As he described the debauch, though, he also indulged his own fantasies that passed through more or less commonplace sexual perversions to coprophilia, necrophilia and explicit torture of the young women and young men who had been kidnapped to share the hosts' pleasures.
Mr. Pasolini has made a very significant change in updating this work, however. The four hosts—the duke, the president, the magistrate and the bishop—are now Fascists, expressing their ultimate desires as the world is crumbling around them in the last days of the fascist regime. They are no longer rebelling against God. They are demonstrating the evil of the human spirit.
Throughout his career as a film maker, Mr. Pasolini was very good at intellectualizing. after the fact, what he was doing on the screen. His best films—"The Gospel According to St. Matthew" and "Accatone"—can stand alone. His later films, even the rambunctious "fable films" ("Decameron" and "A Thousand and One Nights") require a certain amount of rationalizing to be acceptable.
As Mr. Pasolini's vision of the world became increasingly bleak, his films became more arid. "Salo" is the bitter, empty end.

  A free-swinging attack on commercialism, materialism, and their corrupting influence on spirituality and organized religion. The film strikes the right note of satire and compassion in dealing with an avant-garde troupe's modern passion play. Looking for a break from 35 years of staid tradition, a priest (Gilles Pelletier) gets more than he bargained for when he hires little-known actor Lothaire Bluteau to direct and star as Jesus in a play staged on the church lawn. Integrating facts about the historical Jesus into a bold production, the cast earns raves from the city's cultural elite, but the Catholic institution comes down hard on them, threatening to pull the plug if they don't make radical changes.

In a daring conceit, Arcand allows the play itself to take up much of the middle section, giving full breadth to its religious concepts, and, most importantly, the genuine inspiration the cast takes from Jesus' story. Where they seemed like godless artisans before—one starred in sexy perfume commercials, another only comes on board when he's allowed to incorporate a Shakespeare soliloquy—the actors make a connection with the material that belies Arcand's cynical instincts. When the question "What would Jesus do?" starts to affect Bluteau in a manner that goes beyond Method acting, Arcand pushes too far in matching real-life events with their Biblical correlative. But for a director inclined to see the worst in people and society, this temporary bout of compassion counts as a minor step forward.

 This film won 12 Genies (Canadian Academy Awards), including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor. It also won the Jury Prize in Cannes in 1989.

A chilling portrait of a serial killer, Hilditch (Bob Hoskins), who befriends innocent young women, only to turn them into his victims. When he meets Felicia (Elaine Cassidy) -- a pregnant Irish girl who's come to England in search of her boyfriend, with whom she's lost touch -- Hilditch offers his help, drawing her in with his kindly manner and deceptive charm. Little does she realize the grave danger she's in.

The lone special effects shot in ''The Sweet Hereafter'' is beautifully executed and terrible to see. A school bus skids off an icy road and sinks into a frozen lake, taking with it the children of a tiny, once neighborly Adirondack town. Presented midway through this latest, biggest and most wrenching film by the brilliantly analytical Atom Egoyan, this image becomes the basis for a many-faceted moral inquiry. In the aftermath of such calamity, how does life go on?

Mitchell's is one of four voices that narrate ''The Sweet Hereafter,'' a book by Russell Banks, whose vivid and deeply felt moral tales are long overdue in reaching the screen. In a season of expertly adapted contemporary fiction (like ''L.A. Confidential'' and ''The Ice Storm''), this fusion of Mr. Banks's and Mr. Egoyan's sensibilities stands as a particularly inspired mix. Both film and book are carefully fragmented, and both move indirectly toward the enlightenment they seek. But the book's built-in narrative strength helps to make this Mr. Egoyan's most accessible film.

Making this material very much his own, the filmmaker creates schematic, intuitive images that hauntingly crystallize the characters' situations. When first seen, for instance, Mitchell Stephens is trapped in a car wash, receiving a cellular phone call from his own lost child, a vituperative drug addict named Zoe. Stuck in a car being deluged with water, is he being washed clean or washed away? The film's perfect exactitude often provides such resonant images, as the town's life moves from the gaiety of a Ferris wheel to the wheel on a bus to the wheel on a chair. Mr. Egoyan also often invokes Robert Browning's poem ''The Pied Piper of Hamelin,'' with its mercenary piper and its children who disappear.

Mr. Egoyan's keen compositional eye is well served by the film's wide-screen format, which works as handsomely in indoor scenes as in broad, lonely vistas. At one point, for instance, he sustains a marital spat in the background, a telephone call in the left foreground and a calendar on the right, indicating that this is December 1995, though the film's next scene is set in 1997 on an airplane. Transitions are utterly seamless, fluidly carrying the audience back and forth through memory. Mr. Egoyan's earlier films, among them ''Exotica'' and ''The Adjuster,'' depended heavily on the power of such contrasts, but ''The Sweet Hereafter'' works more straightforwardly. For all the suffering it describes, this eloquent film also carries the exhilaration of crystal-clear artistic vision.

Hailed as one of the 50 greatest cartoons of all time, this beautiful animated short tells the story of a single shepherd who takes it upon himself to reseed an entire barren valley. Undeterred by the ravages of the passing years, he continues his project, determined to see a forest grow out of desolate nothingness. The inspiring The Man Who Planted Trees illuminates a message of hope for all humankind. The story was written by Jean Giono.

The sequel to Denys Arcand's Decline of the American Empire (1986). Both films can be viewed separately.

''My son is an ambitious and puritanical capitalist, while I have always been a sensual socialist.''

This is Rémy (Rémy Girard), a Montreal history professor, explaining the relation between his bald, fleshy, libertine self and the slim, impeccably coifed and tailored young man who stands by his hospital bed. The contrast between Rémy and his son, Sébastien (Stéphane Rousseau), who is some kind of international financier, reflects a pop-cultural aperçu available at least since Michael J. Fox starred in ''Family Ties.'' The children of the 1960's, who rebelled so dramatically against their own parents, receive their comeuppance when their children turn out to be materialistic, politically conservative and sexually restrained. Ironic, no?

Yes, of course. But what makes ''The Barbarian Invasions'' much more than a facile exercise in generational conflict is that Denys Arcand, who wrote and directed it, has a sense of history that is as acute as it is playful.

Mr. Arcand is at heart a populist filmmaker, but his brains are at least as well developed as his heart. ''The Barbarian Invasions'' has had enormous success at the Canadian box office, in both English and French-speaking areas, and it is easy to see why. Its humor is broad and its emotions large and accessible. But it is also, at the same time, a sophisticated and rigorous analysis of recent history, in Quebec and beyond. It is an elegy, a seminar and a long, sloppy party, full of food, wine, maudlin moments and endless conversation. Civilization may be declining gradually all around them, but they don't mind. They're in no hurry.

In this roaringly comic and powerfully affecting road movie, Terence Stamp gives a magnificent performance. The British actor plays Bernadette, an aging transsexual traveling through Australia's red desert with two younger drag queens, Mitzi (Hugo Weaving) and Felicia (Guy Pearce), on a streetcar named desire. It's actually a bus named Priscilla, though Blanche in the Tennessee Williams play would recognize Bernadette's dependence on illusion and the kindness of strangers. Those are hard needs to fill in a place where most blokes don't thrill to a close encounter with men who lip-sync to disco hits in heels, glitter frocks and padded bras.

Once the toast of several continents, Bernadette is joining her friends on a grinding two-week bus trek to Alice Springs for a come-down gig. Writer and director Stephan Elliott doesn't ignore the bitchy fun inherent in the material. But he digs deeper, too. Mitzi has a wife and son stashed in Alice Springs, and Felicia knows just how to needle him about it. Weaving and Pearce are both splendid, but the film belongs to Stamp. In the rough towns, when the others wisely dress butch to avoid being insulted or beaten, Bernadette won't surrender her femininity. Stamp gives her a caustic wit and a touchingly beleaguered grace. There's not an ounce of flaming camp in the romance between Bernadette and Bob, the gentleman caller superbly played by Bill Hunter. It's the unspoken connections that give the wild and raunchy Priscilla a direct line to the heart.

Based on the infamous 1954 matricide in New Zealand involving two ninth-grade schoolgirls, Peter Jackson's stunning "Heavenly Creatures" tells the story of an uncommonly powerful love. When Pauline and Juliet are together, the wind is filled with butterflies and the trumpet call of Mario Lanza, "the greatest tenor in the whole world!!" Their universe is an exclusive realm of two, existing half in reality where they are ostracized as peculiar, half in fantasy, where they escape to a highly evolved system of dream lovers and romantic alter egos.

The film begins with Pauline (Melanie Lynskey), a miserable child whose mother runs a boardinghouse. In the photo for her class at her proper girls' school in Christchurch, New Zealand, she sticks out amid all the blond hair and proud smiles like a tarantula on a slice of angel

food cake (with apologies to Raymond Chandler). She's the fat one in the back, the disaster, the smudge with the ugly scowl and unruly black curls.

Because of a bone disease that left her with brittle legs, Pauline is unable to share in the sunny, athletic life of her classmates. Then one day her life is changed forever, when a new student named Juliet (Kate Winslet) joins her in her private war against the bores and commoners of Christchurch.

Like Pauline, Juliet thumbs her nose with proud disdain at parochial Christchurch society. But, unlike her new friend, Juliet is not an ugly duckling, but a kind of fairy princess who plucks Pauline from her lily pad, kisses her, and transforms her.

Because she suffers from tuberculosis, Juliet has had to spend almost as much time in the hospital as Pauline, and the girls' common status as invalids sparks a friendship that grows into a murderous passion.

Jackson, who directed and wrote the screenplay, moves through each of these phases with daring and imagination. His camera follows his lovers as they run breathless through the woods before collapsing into each other's arms at the end of the day, spent from the exertions of their special bond.

To his credit, Jackson doesn't patronize this romance as a girlish crush gone ballistic, or pigeonhole it merely as "lesbian." These girls are in love and, clearly, he envies them their abandon and their complete, unguarded commitment to each other. In Jackson's view, theirs is a great romance that, unfortunately, others were not equipped to deal with.

Perhaps, if the world were more enlightened, more flexible, things might not turn out as gruesomely as they do. The problems begin when Juliet's parents begin to see the girls' relationship as "unwholesome." Because of marital problems, her parents are returning to England and plan to send Juliet to South Africa. Rather than be separated, the girls devise an elaborate plan to, as Pauline says it, "moider mother" and escape to Hollywood.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands of movies have been made about girlfriends and their unique bond, but I can't think of another one where the topic is addressed more frankly or openly. Though the film's subject is sensationalistic in the extreme, Jackson's style is poetic. He presents Pauline and Juliet, who eventually returns to England, where she becomes an author of mystery novels, as singularly blessed. And he raises the question of whether there is any love purer or more gratifying than this same-sex soul-mating. Because their love ends in murder, it's at least implied that the romance is tainted somehow. Does the fault lie with the girls, or with the cramped morality of the time? Thankfully, this powerful, evocative movie leaves the question wide open.

Here's another Australian gem. But this one's an anomaly: an art-house crowd pleaser. Tyro director Baz Luhrmann whips up an entrancing entertainment by lifting clichés out of every musical from 42nd Street to Dirty Dancing. Will maverick dancer Scott Hastings (Paul Mercurio) introduce new steps into a contest even though it's against the rules of old-fart judge Barry Fife (Bill Hunter)? You bet. Will Scott choose an experienced dance partner or go for Fran (Tara Morice) -- a clumsy, mousy, four-eyed unknown -- in the hope of turning her into Cinderella before the big championships? Stupid question. And will Scott and the transformed Fran win the top prize by doing the pasa doble, taught to them by Fran's Spanish father and grandmother? You'd have to be a movie illiterate to doubt it.

So if Strictly Ballroom offers nothing new, why bother? Because Luhrmann is a director with the style and snap to have these tired routines on their feet and kicking like a line of Rockettes. Because Mercurio and Morice are marvels of sensuality in motion and pretty hot even when they kick off their dancing shoes. And mostly because the whole movie brings back the exuberant fizz Hollywood musicals like Newsies have lost. Funny thing about Strictly Ballroom, you see every trick up its sleeve, and you still keep smiling.

The stoic mysticism of Niki Caro's cool-handed charmer ''Whale Rider'' -- in which the young Pai must overcome resistance as she tries to assume her destiny as the leader of a tribe on the New Zealand coast -- is wickedly absorbing. Much of the film's power comes from the delicate charisma of Keisha Castle-Hughes, making her acting debut as Pai.

Ms. Castle-Hughes lacks the traditional resources of an actress, and instead communicates her feelings through a wary hesitation. It doesn't matter that her voice makes her sound a little lost, still trying to find her way into a world that disdains her. Her intelligent, dark eyes are so expressive that she has the piquant confidence of a silent-film heroine.

Her instinctive underplaying gives ''Whale Rider'' an added gravity, with the lush remoteness of the landscape serving as an entrancing contrast to the sugar-rush, you-go-girl empowerment of programmed pandering like ''The Lizzie McGuire Movie,'' whose tweener heroine flails her arms and bats her eyes as if she were sending distress signals. The director demonstrates a class and tact that brand ''Whale Rider,'' which opens today in New York and Los Angeles, as more than a time-filler for young moviegoers or an ironman competition for adults accompanying them.

Pai's natural rectitude -- the way she plays both pride and hurt -- is even used by Ms. Caro as a hereditary trait. Pai's prickly grandfather Koro (Rawiri Paratene) displays a contempt for her that is like a deadpan force of nature itself. Koro, the tribal chief, wanted a grandson to take on his mantle. But Pai's twin brother died in a difficult birth, which also took her mother's life, and her father, Porourangi (Cliff Curtis), has deserted the family for a career as an artist. Koro treats his granddaughter as the living embodiment of a curse. When he bothers to pay attention to her at all, it's through a sharp cutting of his eyes in her direction.

Tradition dictates that the first-born grandson step into the role of chief, but Pai -- named Paikea by her father, after the tribe's ancient ancestor, who legend says arrived in the village on the back of a whale -- is all the family has.

Her patient grandmother Nanny Flowers (Vicky Haughton) encourages Pai to give things time; Nanny Flowers also refuses to crumple under the galling chauvinism of her husband. But Pai has endured the suffering for all of her 12 years. And though she has a plucky physical assurance -- the firm hand of her grandmother has helped keep her demeanor strong -- she still wants the nurturing she feels is her due.

Ms. Caro treats the material with the calm of a silent film and exploits the extravagant beauty of the location for its majesty. Each shot of the vistas in the breathtakingly lovely village is presented with an even clarity; Ms. Caro and her cinematographer, Leon Narbey, let the audience be seduced by the daunting power, rather than overwhelming viewers with it.

With a deft hand, the director bridges the disconnect between the modern touches in the village -- like the hilarious, cranky chatter over card games -- and the determination to cling to traditions. It is evident that tradition is the way the Whangara tribe maintains its spirituality, which defines it.

Ms. Caro's attempt to fight the mawkishness inherent in the film's opening by setting a tone of emotional tidiness makes the rest of ''Whale Rider'' distinctively efficient; this gamble makes the first section seem distended and a little drab. Still, there aren't many filmmakers who would have fought that initial heightening of heartbreak. Too flamboyant an opening would have left the movie with no place to go and embarrassed us with so early a claim on our sentiments. Bear with ''Whale Rider'': once the picture kicks into gear, it has the inspiring resonance of found art.

A "restavèk" is a Haitian child who is turned over by his or her parents to a household that exploits the child’s labor and vulnerability to handle house chores. A restavèk is a house slave.

Parents who engage in such barter do so in theory to provide their child schooling, food, shelter, and clothing in exchange for domestic labor. That is the exception however. The rule is that they throw their child into a nightmarish hell, isolated from parental love and care, the restavèk spends his or her formative years, deprived of schooling, and subjected to long days of work with no pay and living conditions inferior to those of the overseer’s family. These children, who are routinely abused sexually, physically and verbally by members of the household, perform whatever services the overseer requires of them. The restavèk system is unique to Haiti in that the trafficking of such children is done within the country, even within communities.

For additional information and to sign a petition to end child slavery in Haiti please visit  http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/end-child-slavery-in-haiti.html

Thank you for your support!

Few words should strike fear into the hearts of American moviegoers like the phrase "feel-good Australian comedy," but now that The Full Monty has sparked an insatiable desire to see more of the world's quirky underclass, 1997's painfully strident The Castle has been dusted off and released to theaters. A sort of benign Pink Flamingos ladled with a thin broth of Capra-esque uplift, the film champions a tacky, stupidly optimistic family which fights to save its home from government eviction. As the patriarch of his cluttered "castle," Michael Caton has a knack for putting a positive spin on every hardship: The roaring planes at an adjacent airport are outweighed by the convenience of living so close to it, the giant power lines overhead are a testament to man's ability to generate electricity, and his wife's sponge cake is nothing short of a revelation. It wouldn't be such a bad joke, really, were it not stretched so far beyond the limits of patience and credibility. Director Rob Sitch wants to poke gentle fun at Caton and his family while extolling their simple virtues, but he's unwilling to grant them the simple dignity of common sense. When his two-bit lawyer (Tiriel Mora) makes a fool of himself in federal court, Caton is so oblivious to his plainly incompetent performance that he can hardly fathom the resulting verdict. The Castle is brimming with such absurdly contrived moments, tempered only by the most condescending shows of affection. Sitch perches himself too comfortably above his characters to pass for an Aussie answer to John Waters, a director who understands better than anyone that you can't laugh at white trash without getting dirty.

Camera Buff is a comedy about the transformation of a nice happily married young man, who asks for nothing more from life than a little peace and quiet, into a raging, obsessed movie maker.
It's about Filip (Jerzy Stuhr), a purchasing agent for a small factory in provincial Poland, who buys an 8-millimeter movie camera to film his new baby daughter but gets sidetracked into making a film about his factory's 25th anniversary celebration.

From there, it's only a matter of months, and several more movie shorts, before Filip has been abandoned by his neglected wife, is arguing film esthetics at Lodz and having doubts about the the extent to which he should pursue ''truth'' in his documentaries. One of Filip's films, which exposes management sloppiness, results in the wrong people being dismissed.

''Camera Buff'' is exuberantly acted by a good cast headed by Mr. Stuhr, who was seen here this year in another Polish film, ''Top Dog.''

Like many movies about movie nuts who are as committed as Filip, ''Camera Buff'' manifests a strong sense of self-importance. It seems to share Filip's conviction that there is something magical about the camera itself, sometimes confusing the importance of the object photographed with the camera that does the photographing. Much of the film means to be uproariously emotional, but the events we see seldom justify all the overwrought reactions.

Mr. Kieslowski also appears to suggest that art - in this case movie making - must be a process by which the artist consumes the raw materials of his experience and then spits them out as finished art, leaving the people around him in the state of gnawed beef bones. This is a vast oversimplification of the creative process and is probably only applicable, really, to the second-rater.

The director is on much firmer ground when he is satirizing the jargon of criticism and the cliches of film making. The film is fuunniest when it shows us Filip escaping from the various personal crises in his life by stepping outside himself and seeing it all as something to be caught in a viewfinder.

Videoart from the Czech Republic
FRIENDLY FILM – PRATELSKY FILM

A special presentation in coordination with the Czech Center New York .
The films have been selected by Martin Mazanec and Michal Pechoucek in collaboration with Irena Kovarova.

In alphabetical order the artists and the work featured:

Ondrej Brody (Miss Krimi, Lovestory, Ther)

Ivos Hos (3 Bits/3 kousky)

Michal Pechoucek (Pram Room/Kocarkarna, Collector/Sberatel, Honor Guard/Cestna straz)

Matej Smetana (It’s Only a Movie/Je to jenom film)

Ivan Svoboda (Eva Zollner)

Mark Ther (Pick a Wedgie, Burger and Ther, CH.D., Ther)

 Viktor Vokjan (Swan/Labut)

Blind Chance, finished in 1981 but withheld from release for six years, goes off something of a metaphysical deep end, though its structure was innovative enough to provide inspiration (if that's the word) for Sliding Doors and Run Lola Run. In the film's three-part tale, an unassuming medical student's life is transformed by minor variations on the same event: He catches a train, or does not catch it, is arrested for knocking over a policeman in the rush or reconnects with an old love. Whether he becomes a party functionary or an anti-government activist or simply an obedient family man, he's always consumed with the idea of leaving Poland. But when he finally gets his wish in life number three, the results are not what anyone would expect, though they do explain the otherwise cryptic images that open the film. There's no room in Blind Chance's deterministic universe for character or personal choice, which may be why the film feels less fleshed-out, more schematic than some of Kieslowski's others.
Blind Chance focuses on some of the same profound questions that characterize Kieslowski work: faith, politics, love and his lifelong obsession, the role of chance. In "Blind Chance," everything hinges on whether or not his protagonist can outrun a moving train and hoist himself aboard -- and in classic Kieslowskian style, we are shown three possible outcomes.... You'll need to stay awake and alert for this film, so plan accordingly. It's worth the effort, and, if your goal is to know the Kieslowski oeuvre, it's an integral piece.

A 10-hour Polish television serial based on The Ten Commandments, Krzysztof Kieslowski's The Decalogue was branded a masterpiece when it first appeared on the festival circuit in 1988. It's been talked about in hushed tones ever since, yet its reputation is deceptive: not because the film doesn't deserve to be confettied with superlatives, but because the word "masterpiece" can sound as impenetrable and monolithic as the Commandments themselves. On the contrary, The Decalogue finds Kieslowski and co-scenarist Krzysztof Piesiewicz turning a delicate cycle of intimate, funny, heartbreaking, and compassionate works into a symphony of human fallibility. After a decade of bootlegs, imports, and repertory showings, The Decalogue has finally received a proper release on home video, the ideal format for watching this epic in miniature. The late director had specific ideas about cinema and television audiences that factored into his conception of the film, and, as he succinctly puts it in the book Kieslowski On Kieslowski, "Television means solitude while cinema means community." To his mind, colorless Warsaw high-rises like the one where he photographed the episodes fostered no sense of community; the effect for Polish viewers at the time was to have their loneliness and alienation reflected back at them. American moviegoers who know Kieslowski from his luxuriant trilogy, Three Colors: Blue, White, Red, may be surprised by the simple, pared-down visuals and emotional accessibility of the series, but both can be approached in much the same way. Like the trilogy, which took its central themes from the French flag (Blue for liberty, White for equality, Red for fraternity), The Decalogue is profoundly interconnected, but can be watched piecemeal without confusion. Some of the episodes deal with their respective Commandments directly, others indirectly, and a few require interpretive acrobatics to make the connection. More important than any specific Commandment is how these old laws figure into the way people choose to live their lives, and what they pay for their transgressions. Although the episodes have been broken up at various festivals and screenings, with two expanded and released as full-length features (A Short Film About Killing and A Short Film About Love), the tapes are best seen in order. Decalogue 1 ("I am the Lord thy God; Thou shalt have no other Gods before me"), the devastating tale of a father who relies on his computer to determine whether it's safe for his boy to go ice skating, is a primer for things to come. The boy's precocious questions—why do people die? what is death? is there a God? who is He?—cannot be dodged by his father's rational explanations, which is why they're fundamental to religion (and to these films). Other major issues follow, but waiting at the end of Kieslowski's difficult journey is the brisk and hilarious Decalogue 10 ("Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's goods"), which wipes the palette clean. The plot concerns two mismatched brothers—one the lead singer in a death-metal band, the other a suited businessman—who inherit the most valuable stamp collection in Poland but have an awful time trying to sell it. Their greed comes at a steep price: a hundred million zlotys and a spare kidney. Between the bookends, The Decalogue reflects on the Commandments through an extraordinary range of subject matter, including abortion, incest, capital punishment, sexual obsession, parenthood, the Holocaust, and adultery. More a pragmatist than a moralist, Kieslowski finds original ways to muddy issues that would appear to be clear. The blunt Decalogue 5 ("Thou shalt not kill") measures the strangling death of a cab driver against the strangling death of the killer by the state. What's the difference? Under such a sharp moral law, how is one form of killing more justifiable than another? Another plainly stated Commandment is called into question in Decalogue 7 ("Thou shalt not steal"), a wrenching tale of a vulnerable young woman forced by her mother to pretend that she's a sister to her six-year-old daughter. With no money and no destination in mind, she kidnaps the girl and runs away from home. Is this stealing? If so, is it stealing for the mother and the child to be robbed of the truth? Such ambiguities and contradictions inform every relationship in Kieslowski's world, and each individual is left to his or her own devices to sort them out. The films are all set around what the director considered Warsaw's most beautiful housing estate ("It looks pretty awful, so you can imagine what the others are like"), but its inhabitants are all strangers to one another. Characters who play a major role in one story often make a cameo appearance in another later on—bumping into somebody at the entrance, selling postage stamps from behind a counter, and so on—but there's no connection between them. And, barring some random intrusion of fate (a Kieslowski trademark, as it happens), there never will be. Like no film since Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window, The Decalogue uses the camera to peer across a courtyard and into people's private lives, where a new story unfolds from one apartment to the next. It's a tribute to Kieslowski's mastery that he not only survives the comparison, but takes Hitchcock's idea further than anyone could have imagined. One of the great legacies of The Decalogue is that its vision of humanity is infinite: Behind every door, there are desires, secrets, and feelings worth exploring on film. Kieslowski pays homage to Hitchcock directly in Decalogue 6 ("Thou shalt not commit adultery"), perhaps the richest and most affecting episode in the series (a tight race with 4, 5, and 9). In the Jimmy Stewart role, a lonely teenage boy spies on a promiscuous woman through a telescope, but his obsession leads him into trouble. When he eventually declares his love for her, their relationship is altered in ways he's too inexperienced to handle. With astonishing economy, Kieslowski covers more territory in an hour—from the erotic charge of voyeurism and exhibitionism to the promise of real tenderness and love—than most directors could accomplish in twice the time. If there's one especially optimistic image in the mostly bleak cycle, it's the woman looking through the telescope, startled and moved by imagining what she looks like in the boy's eyes. The Decalogue presents a perfect synthesis of ideas and emotions, nourishment for the heart and mind. Kieslowski, who was only 54 when he died in 1996, had a grim view of Poland as it approached the end of Communist rule. This extended to himself and the rest of its citizens, too, who had "become too egotistic, too much in love with ourselves and our needs, as if everybody else [had] disappeared into the background." His feelings are echoed throughout the series, yet a deep empathy and warmth illuminates every scene. The Decalogue is a masterpiece, all right, but on an achingly human scale.

After completing 1994's Red, the third and final installment of his celebrated Three Colors trilogy, director Krzysztof Kieslowski announced an early retirement at 53, much to the dismay of his admirers around the world. Though he died shortly afterward, leaving traces of another high-concept trilogy behind him–the first, Heaven, was faithfully adapted last year by Tom Tykwer–the final shots in Red now seem like the logical endpoint of a career that circled obsessively around capital-letter themes of Fate, Morality, and cosmic Coincidence. Few directors have been so controlled (or controlling) in their effects as Kieslowski was, both in the internal signs, symbols, and color schemes that recur in his work, and in the impossible connections that bind unrelated characters and events, bringing a magical order to a seemingly random universe. Once a director becomes God, what could he possibly do for an encore? Nothing happens by accident in a Kieslowski film, especially in the ornate Colors trilogy, which acts like a sealed (and, at times, airless) passageway into one man's singular vision, inviting the viewer to puzzle out meanings that have already been programmed into the work. Fortunately, Kieslowski had a mind well worth accessing, a prismatic and visually sophisticated sensibility consumed with the mysteries and poignant truths of human behavior. Much like 1988's The Decalogue, Kieslowski's astounding 10-part meditation on the Ten Commandments, Three Colors takes broad concepts into a more intimate and personal realm, demonstrating their relevance to ordinary individuals. Inspired by the colors and concepts of the French flag (Blue for "liberty," White for "equality," Red for "fraternity"), the films each start with a character who withdraws from life after losing everything that was once important, only to be pulled back into society by unexpected forces, mostly from within. Though Kieslowski and longtime screenwriting partner Krzysztof Piesiewicz designed the three films to work well enough on their own, Red wrangles them together in a richly harmonious whole, creating an intersection where all of the trilogy's characters collide. A memorably crusty Jean-Louis Trintignant plays Kieslowski's surrogate, a retired judge who taps his neighbors' phone conversations, presiding over their lives and manipulating them to his own sad end. When model Irène Jacob accidentally hits his dog with her car, Trintignant responds with indifference, but after discovering his secret hobby, Jacob overcomes her initial revulsion and the two embark on a warm friendship that links his past with her future. With daunting scope and ambition, Red opens up several lines of communication–between past and present, unrelated people and events, and one film in the trilogy and another–under the banner of "fraternity," closing with a gesture that affirms Kieslowski's passion for his creations and his command as a storyteller.

Yasujiro Ozu was still largely unknown to Western audiences when his delicate family drama Early Summer was released in 1951. Since that time, new prints of the film have no doubt been made; still, I imagine that most Americans will never have seen an Early Summer in any format as radiant as the new Criterion DVD release of the film. It matters; Ozu’s studied composition and luminous black-and-white cinematography invite adjectives such as “luscious,” even as his content refutes the extravagance and sensuality of the term. Criterion’s Early Summer is a marvel of contrast, restoring to the screen a full palette of blacks, whites, and grays; a scene such as that near the end in which two women walk the dunes by the sea reveals a visual artist working at the peak of his form. You could lose yourself in such images indefinitely, even if the proceedings offered nothing to hold your mind.

But they do. Early Summer, like many of Ozu’s “home dramas,” is the story of a family – three generations of it – that struggles to find serenity within the cycle of life that the state of being human embodies. The central figure is 28-year-old Noriko, an attractive young single woman who lives with her brother Koichi, his wife Fumiko, their two young boys, and her elderly parents. We also meet her neighbors (a widower her age and his mother), her three girlfriends, a great-uncle who comes for a visit, her employer, and her brother’s co-worker. Present in the thoughts of the family, though never pictured, is Noriko’s brother Shoji, a soldier who remains unaccounted for from the war.

In Early Summer Ozu foretells the kind of ensemble drama, propelled by the interactions and encounters common to any community of people, that contemporary audiences find in Amores Perros, Traffic, and almost any film of Robert Altman’s. The various plot threads are gathered loosely into a rich depth of narrative, so that an event affecting one character – the widowed neighbor is transferred to a distant town, for instance – reverberates throughout the film.

At the film’s core are the efforts of Noriko’s family to find her a husband. Noriko herself, infallibly good-natured, seems oblivious to the undertaking and indifferent to its outcome. When, ultimately, this proves not to be true, the decision she suddenly makes changes the life of her family forever. Part of the brilliance of Early Summer is the extent to which this decision affects the viewer as well; the film moves along with the seeming ease of a Leave it to Beaver episode, and it’s astonishing to suddenly find yourself at the brink of these unforeseen emotional depths.

This illusory ease is what’s greatest about Ozu in general. The film’s style, as serene as a sand garden, is the perfect vehicle for chronicling the small pleasures and disappointments that comprise the bigger enterprise of life. Ozu’s genius was to capture these moments in a way no other filmmaker has.

Who would have thought that august Sweden would be sending us a film comedy as witty and cheerfully candid about the complexities of love as any recent French essay on l'amour? Yet that is what Ingmar Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night is—a delightfully droll contemplation of amorous ardors. It opened at the Sutton yesterday.

In a style of writing and direction more characteristic of the French or perhaps the prewar Hungarians than the usually solemn Swedes, Mr. Bergman skips us gaily through a mix-up of youthful and adult love affairs, which, while timed around the turn of the century, are as spicy as any such today.

Spicy, indeed, is the label to put on this charming film which logically ran away with comedy honors at the 1956 festival in Cannes. Its amorous incidents are spicy, in a thoroughly tasteful and elegant way, and its philosophical conclusions are made attractive with the most redolent of intellectual herbs. What is more, its involved situations are invariably comical and deft.

Mr. Bergman is treating one of the conflicts between young and mature, experienced love. In his exquisite cast of characters are a polished Stockholm lawyer who is wed to a second wife many years his junior, this same man's serious and virginal son, his former mistress (a handsome, clever actress), her present lover (a pert dragoon), and the latter's wife. There is also a naughty little housemaid who knows her way around and an aged courtesan, the actress's mother, who has the pleasure of dropping wise epigrams.

The series of personal complications that makes up the content of the film begins when the lawyer seeks the counsel of his former mistress as to how to treat his young wife. This leads to surprising discoveries and developments of crisscrossed love. The young wife, while faithful to her husband, is drawn to his agonized son. The mistress still fancies the lawyer, while entertaining her jealous dragoon. The latter's wife wants her husband, yet is ready to seduce the lawyer to prove it can be done. All very complicated, sophisticated, and droll.

Mr. Bergman, whose previous pictures seen here have been on the deeply serious side, keeps this one light and intriguing with a fine blend of stylized high comedy and farce. His gentlemen are sternly pompous figures while his ladies are sweetly pliable. The matter most pointedly satirized is masculine dignity.

As the lawyer, Gunnar Bjšrnstrand is elegantly stiff yet slyly droll and Jari Kulle is amusingly formal and arrogant as the dragoon. Ulla Jacobsson is delightfully nubile and naive as the young wife. Eva Dahlbeck is full-blown as the mistress and Margit Carlquist is brittle as the wife of the dragoon. Harriet Andersson is disarmingly breezy and lusty as the buxom maid. Bjorn Bjelvenstam is comical as the sad son and Naima Wifstrand is tart as the old courtesan. Ake Fridell is also good as a coachman who explains what the title means—there are three kinds of love that, according to legend, are possible on a summer night.

Check Keith's website for additional information about his work.

www.keithjacoby.com

The Italians dominated world cinema from the late '40s through the early '70s because they boasted an army of masters working high and low, pioneering genres like neo-realism, giallo, spaghetti Westerns, and a peculiarly Italian brand of existential pageantry. With so many canonical films and internationally famous filmmakers, it's no wonder a director as great as Valerio Zurlini could fall through the cracks. The eight feature films he made over a 20-year career were beholden to no particular style, but were highly individualized history plays, featuring idealists dwelling on the fringe of monumental moments.

Zurlini lets the melodrama get a little overheated in Violent Summer, but he peppers the film with unforgettable images, from kinetic footage of kids eating spaghetti and drinking wine to a hair-raising shot of happy beachgoers getting buzzed by a low-flying fighter plane. The film stars Jean-Louis Trintignant as an idle rich kid wooing war-widow Eleonora Rossi Drago in the summer of '43, just prior to the civil war between fascists and anti-fascists.

This one's for the mothers and the militants and the ones in between.

Dancers: Kathryn Bosley, Heidi Green, Lizzy Greene, Jordan Marinov, Amanda McCroskery, Candice Thompson

Musicians: Frank Bevan, Bobby Drake, Mia Greene

In the midst of a heat wave in 1977, New York City became the hunting grounds of the serial killer known as the Son Of Sam. Son Of Sam would turn out to be David Berkowitz, the original disgruntled postal worker, but for a time, thanks in part to constant media coverage, an air of near-paranoia settled over the city, one which found women staying home or cutting their hair and wearing wigs so as not to fit the pattern of Berkowitz's victims. Spike Lee uses this unease as the backdrop for Summer Of Sam, which focuses, for the most part, on the impact Berkowitz's killing spree has on one Italian-American neighborhood. Inadvertently caught up in the furor is John Leguizamo, a Bronx hairdresser who, though he clearly loves his wife (Mira Sorvino), can't seem to stop his philandering ways or integrate his taste for sexual adventure into his marriage. Leguizamo's escalating marital crisis coincides with the return to his neighborhood of old friend Adrien Brody, an obsessive fan of The Who involved in the burgeoning New York punk scene. Brody's spiky hair and decidedly un-Italian affectations (and rumors of other activities) attract the disdain of his neighbors, their suspicions eventually coinciding with their fears of the killer. Some judicious trimming might have improved it, but Summer Of Sam is Lee at his best, a virtuoso piece of filmmaking that's stylish, substantial, and rich in detail. Lee, as in Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights and Ang Lee's The Ice Storm, steeps his film in the knowledge that the past really is another country, with its own laws and now-lost possibilities. Strengthening it further is Summer Of Sam's willingness to incorporate elements of black comedy (as in a bizarre, frightening cameo by John Turturro that captures the insanity of the situation more than a more literal approach to filmmaking could) and believable performances by the entire cast, especially Leguizamo, Sorvino, and Brody. After the near-self-parody of He Got Game, Lee seemed to have drifted away from what made him an interesting filmmaker to begin with. The thrillingly mature and complex Summer Of Sam pretty decisively reverses the trend.

By day Electra-Elf is Jennifer Swallows, a
 mild-mannered reporter for Art Star Scene Magazine
 (A.S.S.) and Fluffer is Boobie, a chihuahua-clothes
 model, but when danger calls, the two put on stylish
 leotards and kick butt, taking down corrupt senators,
 sleazy frat-boys, satanic cults, landlords,
 zombie-tourists and others in each heart-stopping
 episode.
 A hit on Manhattan Neighborhood Network, Electra Elf
 features local artstars and comedians from the Open
 Mike scene.

 "Utterly intoxicating. The closest thing we've got to,
 say, The Ridiculous Theatrical Co... Costumes alone
 scream with genius. Ditto special effects!" - Mark
 Kramer, Blacklisted Journalist

 To be screened:
 FILTHY RICH starring Neon Music
 NO PLAGUE LIKE HOME starring the voice of Vox, Rev Jen
 VILE BUDDIES starring Rev Jen, Alison Gordy, Brenda
 Bergman
 OF LICE & MEN starring Chuck Funk, Rev Jen, FaceBoy,
 Michelle Carlos
 HELLBOUND HEIRESSES starring Rev Jen, Neal Medlyn
 OLD MAN & THE SEA MONKEY starring Rev Jen, Big Mike,
 O'Debra Twins
 I, NAUSEUS starring Rev Jen Giorgio Handman

This rarely-seen treasure will be run at true silent speed for correct movement! The first film to match stop-motion (tabletop miniature) animation with live action, the public was amazed to see dinosaurs come to life.   Wallace Beery is half-mad Professor Challenger, leading an expedition to a Jurassic plateau in Brazil.  Based on Conan Doyle’s thrilling story, with special effects by Willis O’Brien.  We’ll also see Creation, O’Brien’s test reel for  his next feature, King Kong!  And the first chapter of a vintage serial to be continued next month.

Key Fitz - Host of show/Comedian
Danny  LoFaro - Co-Host/Comedian
El Juglar - Juggler
April Brucker - Ventriloquist
Ril Oji - Dancer
Bob James - Elvis
Jared - Sideshow performer
 
Sarah Blakemore
Reigning Queen of Everything
 
"Why everything? Oh, Darling, because a girl should never limit herself, ever."

1. THE BOX by Seth Fragomen ( 3 min, 2007)
2. THE BOLERIUM by Nathan & Keary Kenzinger ( 23 min, 2006)
3. ANIMATION BRUNCH by Steve Schmitz and Inju Keum (10 min, 2007)
4. DIG ALL JIVE by William Palminteri ( 6 min, 2006)
5. LOVE IS A GAME WE PLAY by Robert Flanagan & Suzan Al-Doghachi ( 3min, 2007)
6. THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA by Nick Zedd (18 min, 1998)
7. THE TOMORROW GODS: THE FIGHT FOR PLANET TERRA by Michael Park with music by Martin Rev (39 min, 2007)

Stephen Sondheim once said that melodrama and farce were his two favorite forms of theater because “they are obverse sides of the same coin.” The Korean writer and director of “Three-Iron,” has minted a cinematic example of that coin with Time a tale of big-city 20-somethings and the masks they wear. Throughout, Mr. Kim flips between soapy melodrama and dry, self-aware comedy. The effect is thrilling and disorienting, like walking on a trampoline.

The film starts and ends with the same scene: a woman clad in a long coat, sunglasses and a surgical mask (an echo of “Dressed to Kill”) leaving a plastic-surgery clinic and colliding with our heroine, See-hee (Seong Hyeon-ah). The impact causes the patient to drop and break a framed photograph. See-hee promises to repair it and takes it along to a coffee shop, where she’s meeting her boyfriend, Ji-woo (Ha Jung-woo).

Clearly, their relationship is doomed. See-hee accuses Ji-woo of growing bored with her and having a wandering eye, paranoid accusations that she thinks are confirmed when Ji-woo checks out a waitress, then interrupts their conversation to exchange insurance information with a young woman who dinged his parked car. When the lovers’ quarrel reaches a Jerry Springer pitch and See-hee stomps out of the coffee shop, the driver tells Ji-woo, “She must love you very much; I envy you.”

See-hee, a self-loathing basket case who once said, “I’m sorry for having the same boring face every day,” goes to the clinic glimpsed in the opening and signs up for a new face. Then “Time” switches its focus to poor Ji-woo, who knows only that his girlfriend suddenly moved away without saying goodbye. He doesn’t realize that the cute new coffee-shop waitress with the suspiciously similar name Seh-hee (Park Ji-yun) seems familiar for a reason.

As “Time” follows Ji-woo through familiar big-city mating rituals — karaoke, speed dating, thwarted one-night stands — en route to an uneasy relationship with his new/old love, it becomes clear that Mr. Kim has more on his mind than the ethics of nose jobs.

“Time” has been described as a comedy about the hollowness of relationships in a global consumerist culture, and it certainly is. The film’s three lead performances, by Mr. Ha as Ji-woo and by Ms. Seong and Ms. Park as the two incarnations of his lover, are fearlessly honest, so attuned to contemporary anxieties about sex, love and social status that the characters’ unhappiness is as squirm-inducing as the movie’s close-ups of sliced flesh.

But while the film’s cultural context is of the moment, its depiction of romantic desperation is timeless. Many scenes end on the same uneasy note, a mix of cynical dissatisfaction and desperate, almost childlike neediness. This, too, is reminiscent of Sondheim, specifically the title “Sorry-Grateful,” a song from “Company.” Like Sondheim’s Nixon-era swingers, Mr. Kim’s clueless, self-absorbed 21st-century materialists are miserable in love, and they can’t get enough of it.

Mr. Kim repeats ideas, situations and shots with musical precision. He puts certain sentiments in the mouths of different characters at different times. He lets pivotal moments play out through scrims or partitions, or as reflections in mirrors or windowpanes, depriving them of emotional solidity. He shows characters donning actual or metaphoric masks (getting new faces, moving to new places, starting new relationships) and then becoming depressed when these alterations alter little. As Sondheim’s married men sing in “Sorry-Grateful,” “Everything’s different, nothing’s changed/Only maybe slightly rearranged.”

The flyspeck insignificance of the characters’ narcissism is expressed through a recurring setting: a sculpture garden that includes a pair of giant hands topped by a connected series of increasingly small iron squares that seem to vanish against the sky. The film’s oft-repeated image of lovers photographing themselves in those palms, naïvely trying to immortalize their affection, is the closest the director comes to a moral: Don’t obsess over surfaces, because your life is not really in your hands.

Nick Zedd presents

Llik Your Idols, a film by Angelique Bosio (2007/France/69 min)

Discover! The New York underground scene of the 80's!

Throw yourself
Into an exciting, anarchic and repulsive world that you won't forget!

Featuring:

Exclusive interviews with Lydia Lunch, Nick Zedd, Richard Kern, Joe Coleman, Thurston Moore...

Never before seen footage & archives

PLUS a rare screening of Thrust In Me by Nick Zedd/R. Kern (1984)

In the South American jungle supplies of nitroglycerin are needed at a remote oil field.
The oil company pays four men to deliver the supplies in two trucks.
A tense rivalry develops between the two sets of drivers on the rough remote roads where the slightest jolt can result in death.

The acting is superb: handsome young Yves Montand's Mario, a Parisian gangster on the run from who-knows-what, maintains is Gallic savoir-faire.
His compatriot , Charles Vanel, is Jo, an older, more burnt-out wiseguy, but still full of macho moxie.

Director Clouzot squeezes unbearable tension out of nearly every scene.
The stripped-down existentialism of the characters, the starkness of their shared dilemma, the grim and grimy scenery, and the superb black-and-white cinematography cannot fail to hold your attention.

This month theme: Home for the holidays.
Cast to be announced.

THE PRISONER REMIX by Power Themes 90.

THE VOLUPTUOUS HORROR OF HOLISTIC BIRTHING by Ned Ambler.

CRASH 'N' BURN by Ross McLaren.

SHE DREAMS THE WORLD by Lili White.

HITCHHIKER: JAZZ HEAVEN by Tony White.

ONE FM by Paul Grant

THE PURSUIT OF SELF by Myles David Jewell.

DISCOTECH by Michael Park.

LOVE AND DEATH AT THE ROMP by Robert Flanagan.

Scopitones (pronounced Scope-a-tones) are one of the great lost gems of modern pop music and culture. They are a treasure trove of fantastic songs and wild imagery. Early 1960s precursors to today's music videos, they were distributed on color 16mm film with a magnetic soundtrack, and made to be shown only on a Scopitone film jukebox.

The first Scopitones were made in France around 1960, and the Scopitone craze spread throughout Europe (particularly in West Germany and England) before crossing the Atlantic to the United States in mid-1964. A few years later, Scopitones fell victim to bad luck, poor business decisions and alleged Mafia connections. Most of the machines were destroyed but the films became highly prized by collectors. Bursting with bright colors, sexy babes, and hunky guys, Scopitones are an amazing time capsule of 1960s pop culture with a special focus on classic French ye-ye and Vegas lounge music.

Bobby Vee, Joi Lansing, Françoise Hardy, Johnny Halliday, Frank Sinatra Jr., Buddy Greco, Billy Lee Riley, Donna Theodore, Sylvie Vartan, Les Chats Sauvages, Colette Magny, Sonny King, and Jody Miller, are just some of the wild performers featured on these rare original Scopitones.

Tom Thumb (1998) by Nick Zedd

The Wild World of Lydia Lunch (1983) by Nick Zedd

The Right Side of My Brain (1985) by R. Kern starring Lydia Lunch, Henry Rollins, Jim Foetus and others.

Not the latest documentary on the Bush administration but  the tale of clever vagabong Abu, the boy from India, in a top-notch color adventure with excellent special effects.  He gets turned into a dog by evil magician Conrad Veidt, uncorks the genie bottle, flies to the end of the earth to battle the giant spider, steals the idol's ruby eye, rides the flying carpet.  Rex Ingram is the genie, John Justin and June Duprez are the lovers.  An all-time family favorite, good entertainment for young and old.

This installment features:

1. UFO REMIX (THE ARRIVAL) by Power Themes 90.
2. DOC SOLARIS: MAN OF THE FUTURE by Michael Park.
3. COINCIDO CONTICO ENCOOTRO (I COINCIDE WITH YOU IN THE OTHER) by  Itziar Barrio.
4. WORDS ON PEACE PEACE by Lili White.
5. WHEREVER SEPTEMBER/ ROSALIND by Nisi Jacobs.
6. DON'T STOP by Ned Ambler.
7. THE BLOND LEADING THE BLOND by Jack Waters (featuring Philly).
8. CANDY-COATED EVIL by Mike Kuchar (featuring Samoa and Kembra Pfahler).
9. TURNTABLE TRAUMA by Kevin Jarvis.
10. WHOLEY MOSES by Todd Heyman ( with a guest appearance by Linda      Hamilton)

A Christmas Spectacular!!!
Cast to be announced.

Ernest Hemmingway once remarked that the best thing a writer could do, as far as the movies were concerned, was drive to California, toss a script over the border, grab the cash, and split as quickly as possible. In the bad old days, the studio system did not assume that the Book Reading and Movie Going Worlds had any sort of Venn intersection, and treated the novels they purchased accordingly.

Case in point: Nelson Algren, a once celebrated author whose books did not fare well on the silver screen. He was kicked off the set of the film adaptation of his 1950 novel, The Man With the Golden Arm, after butting heads with director Otto Preminger, a man with a reputation for crushing souls (for example, Dorothy Dandridge). The resulting movie, while a classic in its own right, bore little resemblance to the novel that inspired it. Algren swore he would never deal with "Hollywood" again.

He was happy, however, to take the money and run, as evidenced by the 1962 adaptation of his novel, Walk on the Wild Side, just released on DVD for the first time. There are worse adaptations, to be sure, and the book's digressive, symbolic prose style is highly resistant to dramatizat