Italy
THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY is inspired by the existentialist novel of the same name by G.K. Chesterton (1908). The novel is considered a metaphysical thriller, and our film could be considered the same, though it also can be thought of in more classical cinematic terms a psychological and supernatural thriller.
Fleeing 1930s New York and leaving behind a chequered past, the giltzy divorcee Mrs Stella Erlynne travels to Italy’s sun-dappled Amalfi coast. Mrs Erlynne’s appearance causes a stir amongst the visiting aristocracy. Based on the Oscar Wilde play Lady Windemere’s Fan
This story takes place in a small town on the Hungarian Plain. In a provincial town, which is surrounded with nothing else but frost. It is bitterly cold weather — without snow. Even in this bewildered cold hundreds of people are standing around the circus tent, which is put up in the main square, to see — as the outcome of their wait — the chief attraction, the stuffed carcass of a real whale. The people are coming from everywhere. From the neighboring settlings, even from quite far away parts of the country. They are following this clumsy monster as a dumb, faceless, rag-wearing crowd. This strange state of affairs — the appearance of the foreigners, the extreme frost — disturbs the order of the small town. Ambitious personages of the story feel they can take advantage of this situation. The tension growing to the unbearable is brought to explosion by the figure of the Prince, who is pretending facelessness. Even his mere appearance is enough to break loose destructive emotions…
Riko is an honest man, who can count on a group of real friends and a wife who, between highs and lows, he loves forever. But he is also a very angry man with his time, which seems to be punctuated only by backlashes and false starts.
A man develops an attraction to the daughter of his father’s fiancee.
Five college friends have a reunion in a castle in Piemonte, Italy. The local legend says the queen of the castle, Johanna of Anjou, was blamed for the local drought and famine. Before she was hung by the villagers, she placed a curse in her journal then killed herself. The group is intrigued by the legend, and one night when drunk, they enter the forbidden room where Joanna died. There, they find her journal. The spirit of Joanna returns, and her thirst for revenge is horrific.
Threatened by creditors, a newly unemployed man agrees to work for a debt collector, but soon discovers his deal with the devil has unexpected costs.
Roberto Benigni adapts the classic children’s tale by Carlo Collodi for the big-budget family-oriented comedy Pinocchio.
In a near future, due to the effects of an uncompromising law on the eco-sustainability of supports, paper has become a rare item, a luxury possession, controlled by the “Big Z”: Zimurgh Corporation.
This film focuses on contemporary 30- and 40-somethings trying to make sense of their lives in an age in which the old certainties have disappeared. Lorenzo and Davide make their lives together within a circle that includes Antonio and Angelica, married with children; Nerval and her policeman husband.
Hannah is the intimate portrait of a woman’s loss of identity as she teeters between denial and reality. Left alone grappling with the consequences of her husband’s imprisonment, Hannah begins to unravel. Through the exploration of her fractured sense of identity and loss of self-control, the film investigates modern day alienation, the struggle to connect, and the dividing lines between individual identity, personal relationships, and societal pressures.
A documentary consisting of a series of travelogue vignettes providing glimpses into cultural practices throughout the world intended to shock or surprise, including an insect banquet and a memorable look at a practicing South Pacific cargo cult.
Diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, documentarian Matt Embry takes viewers on a transnational journey — from Italy to Canada, and from the lab to the home — in order to examine the politics of the condition.
Life flows peacefully in Vinci: Leonardo is struggling with his incredible inventions, Lorenzo helps him and Gioconda observes them mockingly. When A mysterious storyteller comes to town and speaks of a hidden treasure, an adventure begins.
Claudio Verona is a young and cynical businessman. One day he gets locked in his Roman office elevator before an important meeting with a client. Soon this annoying obstacle will turn into a nightmare. For outside that metal cage, a deadly virus has begun to infect and transform people into extremely violent and dangerous zombies. Claudio has to get out of his claustrophobic space but it seems the elevator is the safest place to be in the city.
Marcello, a small and gentle dog groomer, finds himself involved in a dangerous relationship of subjugation with Simone, a former violent boxer who terrorizes the entire neighborhood. In an effort to reaffirm his dignity, Marcello will submit to an unexpected act of vengeance.
The Ötztal Alps, more than 5300 years ago. A Neolithic clan has settled near a creek. It is their leader Kelab’s responsibility to be the keeper of the group’s holy shrine Tineka. While Kelab is hunting, the settlement is attacked. The members of the tribe are brutally murdered, amongst them Kelab’s wife and son, only one newborn survives – and Tineka is gone. Blinded by pain and fury, Kelab is out for one thing alone – vengeance.
Sarah and her friends decide to spend the weekend at an old villa Sarah mysteriously inherited. After finding a Ouija Board in the attic, Sarah and her friends unknowingly awaken an evil force connected to the villa’s hidden secrets. To fight the unimaginable horror they will have to face their darkest fears and worst nightmares.
THE HAPPY PRINCE tells the story of the last days of Oscar Wilde. This great man of letters, once one of the most famous authors in England, is now a superstar on the skids. As Oscar lies on his death bed, the past comes flooding back to him, transporting him to other times and places.
I want to describe myself as someone who likes to torture himself by learning something really difficult and not very useful. I know there’s such a word for describing someone who likes to be tortured sexually. But it’s not what I’m looking for.
When a terrorist’s body, infected with a stolen chemical, is recovered by the US military, the corpse is cremated, unintentionally releasing the virus/bacteria into the atmosphere over a small island. Soon the infected populace mutate into flesh-hungry zombies, and a trio of soldiers on leave must team up with a group of tourists and board themselves up in an abandoned hotel as they try to fend off the agile and aggressive living dead.
When a family moves into a San Francisco apartment, an opportunistic troll decides to make his move and take possession of little Wendy (Jenny Beck), thereby paving the way for new troll recruits, the first in his army that will take eventual control of the planet. We soon discover Torok is the ex-husband of Eunice St. Clair, a resident in the building who was married to Torok.
Stanislas Hassler blazes the development of modern art in his gallery, packed with works of surprising shapes, colours and textures, and where exhibitions turn into media events. Gilbert Moreau is one of the artists whose sculptures are on display in the gallery. His wife, Josée, is intrigued by the stern Stanislas, who devotes his free time to photography in an apartment that highlights his sophisticated artistic tastes. But besides enlarged pictures of calligraphic samples, Stanislas is amassing a collection of photographs that reveal a disturbed character. So why would Josée endanger her mature relationship with Gilbert for the morbid observation of Stanislas’s hidden personality?
Wind From the East is a product of Jean-Luc Godard’s involvement, during the late 60s and early 70s, with a collective filmmaking experiment known as the Dziga Vertov Group. The film is, typically of the films he made during this period, about ideas and simultaneously about how best to express those ideas through the medium of film. The film deals with the situation of a strike and, during its first half, methodically analyzes the different components of the strike: the workers, the radical students who encourage the strike while not quite being able to communicate in the same terms as the workers, the union delegates and other middlemen who preach moderation and compromise, the employers who demand the immediate resumption of work, the police state that suppresses the strike on behalf of capitalism.
Based on Paolo Villaggio’s books “Fantozzi” and “Il secondo, tragico Fantozzi”, which are popular in Italy, this film tells the story of an unfortunate accountant’s life over the course of one year, shown in a variety of sketches, segments and provocative sequences making Fantozzi a very unlucky person indeed.
Five short stories loosely dealing with the roles of women in society. A superstar actress travels to a mountain resort, only to evoke jealousy from women and lust from men. A woman offers to take an injured man to the hospital. A widowed father and his son seek for a new wife/mother. A man seeks revenge for a woman’s honor. A bored housewife tries to explain to her husband that he’s not as romantic as he used to be.
In the South American jungle, supplies of nitroglycerine 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.
Returning to themes he first explored in La strada (1954), Fellini crafts a parable on the whisperings of the soul that only madmen and vagabonds are capable of hearing. The odd couple, Ivo Salvini (Benigni), a fake inspector of wells, and Gonnella (Villaggio), a former prefect, wander through the Emilia-Romagna countryside of Fellini’s childhood and discover a dystopia of television commercials, fascism, beauty pageants, rock music, Catholicism, and pagan ritual.
The O’Neills lived happily in their house in the Australian countryside. That was until one day fate struck blindly, taking the life of Peter, the father, leaving his grief-stricken wife Dawn alone with their four children. Among them, eight-year-old Simone denies this reality. She is persuaded that her father still lives in the giant fig tree growing near their house and speaks to her through its leaves. But the tree becomes more and more invasive and threatens the house. It must be felled. Of course, Simone won’t allow it.
Once again billed as Montgomery Wood, Giuliano Gemma plays a civil war soldier who returns to his family land to find his family decimated, his property taken over by a family of Mexican bandits and his fiancee about to marry the Mexican gangster behind all this. Bent on revenge, he goes undercover disguised as a Mexican and discovers he has a daughter!
While a Mexican revolutionary lies low as a U.S. rodeo clown, the cynical Polish mercenary who tutored the idealistic peasant tells how he and a dedicated female radical fought for the soul of the guerrilla general Paco, as Mexicans threw off repressive government and all-powerful landowners in the 1910s. Tracked by the vengeful Curly, Paco liberates villages, but is tempted by social banditry’s treasures, which Kowalski revels in.
Orphaned brothers Kutchek and Gore are adopted by a tribe led by Canary the owner of a powerful jewel. The evil Kadar wants both Canary and the jewel. Attacking the tribe he kidnaps Canary but the stone eludes him. The brothers are taken to be trained as gladiators and years later have grown to be VERY big. They escape and set off on a quest to find the jewel and rescue Canary.
The film reveals how and why a supposedly revolutionary Italian girl has in fact fallen prey to bourgeois ideology.
