Psychologist Kris Kelvin is about to embark on an interstellar journey to a space station orbiting the remote oceanic planet Solaris. He spends his last day on Earth reflecting on his life while walking by a lake near his childhood home where his elderly father still resides. Upon his arrival at Solaris Station, none of the three remaining scientists bother to greet Kelvin, ...
Sylvia works as a secretary and lives in the outskirts of London with her intellectually disabled sister, Hilda. Her solitary and bleak existence turns around a small group of people who, like Sylvia, have communication problems. Mike Leigh's debut film is ironic and moving. The director considers it "the mother of all my movies".
Kieslowski's diploma film tells about some young girls, workers at one of Lodzi's large textile factories, protesting against the break-up of a band of old style mandolin players. The film shines a peculiar and enchanting light on the daily life in an unusual and decadent city.
Louis Mahé, a wealthy tobacco plantation owner on Réunion island in the Indian Ocean, is awaiting the arrival of his bride to be, Julie Roussel, whom he's never met. One day, she escapes with all his money and it turns out that her real name is Marion. She is an adventurer and, together with an accomplice, has killed the real Julie. Louis leaves for France with the idea of t...
Discharged from the army as unfit, Antoine Doinel looks for his place in the world dealing with different work and tries to re-establish a relationship with his former girlfriend, Christine, without any success. After a short experience as concierge, he finds a job as private detective and takes a fancy to a woman he has under surveillance. In between shadowing and investiga...
Kurage is an imaginary island south-west of Japan and its inhabitants still live like primitives and believe that the island has been created by the gods. One day, the engineer Kariya arrives from Tokyo, looking for a source of water which is needed by a local sugar refinery. The local population will undermine his trust in rationality. The movie tells about the eternal conf...
n Macao, Mr. Clay, a wealthy old merchant, with the idea of showing that money is more powerful than any other phantasy, wants to make a legendary tale come true. The story tells about a rich old man who offers a sailor some money to impregnate his wife. "I don't like pretense… - Clay says - I like facts. If this tale has never happened, I will make it true". Orson Welles' f...
Mouchette is fourteen years old and lives in an isolated rural French village with her alcoholic father, her bedridden mother and an infant brother. Perennially mocked and humiliated by her classmates and adults, Mouchette is raped by a poacher she had helped. Based on the novel of the same name by Georges Bernanos, Mouchette is a tale of misery and cruelty that doesn't leav...
L’infanzia, la vita e la morte di Balthazar, asino nato fra i pastori. Acquistato appena nato per rallegrare l’estate dei figli di una famiglia borghese, viene rifiutato e rivenduto l’anno successivo perché è diventato grosso e irsuto. Iniziano per Balthazar le vicissitudini che lo porteranno, ignaro, a confrontarsi con gli uomini.
Yoshimoto Ogata, a pornographer, lives with his wife Haru, cursed by the restless spirit of her dead first husband, and her two children. His step-son, Koichi, wants to go to university and her step-daughter, Keiko, is entering adolescence. He lusts after his step-daughter and Koichi keeps provoking him and threatening to abandon the family. Subu fears that these stormy fami...
Harry Hinkle, an honest cameraman, is knocked over during a football game by the Afro-American champion Luther "Boon Boom" Jackson. His brother in law, an unscrupulous lawyer, persuades him to pretend to be paralyzed to cheat the insurance. A funny comedy about family ties, cynicism and material interests: everybody is cheating to satisfy their own needs.
Orville works as a piano teacher and songwriter in a small town. One day, he finds himself obliged to host a famous singer and renowned Don Juan in his house. This might be the chance to make him listen to his songs and become rich, but the risk that he could seduce his wife is too big. To protect her, Orville prepares a set-up: he replaces his unaware wife with the docile w...
Hiraoka breaks into Riichi's house, while he is away with his son, and he raped his wife. She decides to commit suicide but not before having seen her son for the last time. When her husband is back, Sadako can't find the courage to tell him what happened. Two days after, while Riichi is visiting his lover and colleague, Hiraoka breaks into his house again and Sadako takes a...
Dreyer's final film is a Danish drama based on the 1906 play of the same name by Hjalmar Söderberg. Gertrud, unhappily married with a lawyer and politician, meets first her former lover, a famous poet, then starts a relation with a young composer and eventually ends up living alone. Thirty years later, Gertrud looks back at her life. She says that love is the only thing that...
During a battle in Saragossa, a French officer finds a large book with strange drawings that capture his attention. While he is looking at it, an enemy officer tries to arrest him but ends up translating the book for him. The second officer recognize its author as his own grandfather. The book and the movie tell about the life of Alfonso Van Worden, who was a captain in the...
Cherbourg, 1957. Geneviève Emery, whose mother sells umbrellas at her at a tiny boutique, loves Guy Foucher, a young mechanic who lives with his sickly aunt. When Guy leaves to become a soldier in the Algerian war, Geneviève finds out to be pregnant and decides to marry the wealthy Roland Cassard. Demy tells about an impossible love story which takes place in a port city ...
In his second feature film, Roman Polanski follows the frightful story of a neurosis. The main character, Carole, interpreted by Catherine Deneuve, left alone in the apartment she shares with her sister, drifts towards a kind of neurosis and can't stand the presence of any men. Polanski said: "Insanity is scaring because you know that it can bring you to yourself". A visiona...
The film is loosely based on the life of Andrei Rublev (1370-1430), the great 15th-century Russian icon painter and is set during the turbulent period following the Mongol invasion of Russia. Andrej is a young monk, a iconographer, wandering to look for a job around churches and monasteries in Russia. He is convinced that in his life there is only space for art and religion....
Johnny Barrett, an ambitious journalist of the Globe, is determined to win a Pulitzer Prize by writing a front page article. Together with the director of the newspaper, he plans to solve a murder committed in a lunatic asylum and witnessed only by three inmates, from whom the police have been unable to extract the information. With the connivance of a psychiatrist, and the ...
The film follows Tome's life from the war to the beginning of the 60s'. Grown up in the north to a family of poor farmers, Tome has always been put upon in working and sexually abused. Nobuko, her daughter, is born from a one-night stand. Following a failed marriage, Tome moves to a city and finds her own independence working first as a worker and maid and after as a prosti...
