"People are deluded animals, God is blind or dead, and life is meaningless..."
The Danish writer and director Anders Thomas Jensen's 2005 feature, Adam's Apples - about a neo-Nazi sentenced to community service at a rural church run by a sunshine-and-lollipops vicar - is one of the latest examples of the post-Pulp Fiction bloody comedy. It's also one of the weirdest, mixing glib humor with dead-serious spiritual inquiry...
Ian arrives at a Lisbon clinic for the visually impaired to teach blind patients navigational skills. The clinic’s international community greet his unorthodox methods with both anticipation and scepticism. For Ian, orientation flows from the mind and imagination - then sensory perception follows. His methods, though effective, are not without risk...
Imagine manifests itself as a metaphor of the desire for liberation, freedom and trust, but also deception. Little by little, the film presents a discrete reflection on looking at and perceiving the reality we have...
It was a troubled time for Hitchcock (Anthony Hopkins) who after the great popular success of North by Northwest (1959) could focus only on those critics who charged he was growing old and losing his edge. Determined to prove them wrong, he grew obsessed with a book by Robert Bloch, based on the life of a Wisconsin body snatcher named Ed Gein...
No other Hitchcock film had a greater impact. "I was directing the viewers," the director told Truffaut in their book-length interview. "You might say I was playing them, like an organ."
What makes "Psycho" immortal, when so many films are already half-forgotten as we leave the theater, is that it connects directly with our fears: Our fears that we might impulsively commit a crime, our fears of the police, our fears of becoming the victim of a madman, and of course our fears of disappointing our mothers...
Ordell Robbie: I'm serious as a heart attack...
Roger Ebert: I like the moment when the veins pop out on Ordell's forehead. It's a quiet moment in the front seat of a van, he's sitting there next to Louis, he's just heard that he's lost his retirement fund of $500,000, and he's thinking hard. Quentin Tarantino lets him think. Just holds the shot, nothing happening. Then Ordell looks up and says, "It's Jackie Brown.'' He's absolutely right. She's stolen his money. In the movies people like him hardly ever need to think. The director has done all their thinking for them. One of the pleasures of "Jackie Brown,'' Tarantino's new film, based on a novel by Elmore Leonard, is that everybody in the movie is smart. Whoever is smartest will live...
Ordell Robbie: Is she dead, yes or no?
Louis: Pretty much...
Léon: The rifle is the first weapon you learn how to use, because it lets you keep your distance from the client. The closer you get to being a pro, the closer you can get to the client. The knife, for example, is the last thing you learn...
Dwayne: You know what? Fuck beauty contests. Life is one fucking beauty contest after another. You know, school, then college, then work, fuck that. And fuck the air force academy. If I wanna fly, I'll find a way to fly. You do what you love, and fuck the rest.
Frank: I'm glad you're talking again, Dwayne. You're not nearly as stupid as you look...
The movie has the attitude of a gas station attendant who tells you to check your own oil. It's grungy and unkempt, and Dante and Randal look like they have been nourished from birth on beef jerky and Cheetos. They are tired and bored, underpaid and unlucky in love, and their encounters with customers feel like a series of psychological tests...
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul..
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud..
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed..
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid..
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul...
The Magdalene Laundries were institutions sponsored and maintained by the Catholic Church in Ireland for the incarceration of young women thought to be a moral danger to themselves and others - unmarried mothers or simply girls who were considered hussies and whores, no better than they should be. With the legal consent of their fathers, they were imprisoned and made to work for no pay in imitation of Mary Magdalene in laundries, always exploited and in many cases sexually abused. The laundries existed until the 1970s, but the very last did not close until 1996. Mullan's gut-wrenching film tells the story of three Dublin women in 1964, fictional composites of what appear to be real cases...
Next movie
#222 Dancer in the Dark
12 May 2025, 3:00 pm
This isn't the last song, there's no violin, the choir is quiet, and no one takes a spin, this is the next to last song, and that's all...
