Director: Alex Cox
Stars: Ed Harris, Richard Masur, Rene Auberjonois
Genre: Biography, Drama, History
Country: USA | Mexico
An unconventional retelling of the life of William Walker, a 19th century American mercenary leader who became the president of Nicaragua.
Director: James Ivory
Stars: James Wilby, Rupert Graves, Hugh Grant
Genre: Drama, Romance
Country: UK
After his lover rejects him, a young man trapped by the oppressiveness of Edwardian society tries to come to terms with and accept his sexuality.
Director: Federico Fellini
Stars: Sergio Rubini, Antonella Ponziani, Maurizio Mein
Genre: Comedy, Drama, Fantasy
Country: Italy
Federico Fellini accepts the request of a television crew to be interviewed about his career, narrating memories, dreams, realities and fantasies.
Director: Ettore Scola
Stars: Vittorio Gassman, Fanny Ardant, Stefania Sandrelli
Genre: Drama, Romance
Country: Italy | France
With the background of the XX century Italian history, Carlo, a retired teacher, traces the vicissitudes of his family.
Director: Nils Gaup
Stars: Mikkel Gaup, Ingvald Guttorm, Nils Utsi
Genre: Action, Adventure, Drama
Country: Norway
A Warband intent on slaughter terrorizes northern Scandinavian villages in 1000 AD.
Director: Stanley Kwan
Stars: Leslie Cheung, Anita Mui, Alex Man
Genre: Drama, Fantasy, Music
Country: Hong Kong
Fleur is the blue angel in one of Hong Kong’s “flower houses” – bordellos and night clubs of the 1930’s. A detached and beautiful performer, she falls in love with Twelfth Master Chan, heir to a chain of pharmacies. They agree to a suicide pact. Jump ahead 50 years to modern Hong Kong: Fleur’s ghost appears in Yuen’s newspaper office, wanting to place an ad to find Chan, who never arrived in the afterlife. Yuen, and his equally bewildered girl friend, An Chor, are captivated by Fleur and her story.
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Stars: Woody Allen, Freddy Buache, Leos Carax
Genre: Comedy, Drama, Sci-Fi
Country: USA | Bahamas | France | Switzerland
Everything returns to normal after Chernobyl. That is, everything but art. Most of the great works are lost, and it is up to people like William Shakespear Junior the Fifth to restore the lost artwork of the human race. He finds strange goings-on at a resort enough to remind him of all the lines of the play, dealing with mob boss Don Learo and his daughter Cordelia, a strange professor named Jean Luc-Godard (sic), who repeatedly xeroxes his hand for no particular reason. He is followed by four humanoid goblins that keep tormenting Cordelia. There is also the gentleman whose girlfriend, Valerie, isn’t always visible. Then the film is sent off to New York for Mr. Alien to edit.
Director: Patrice Leconte
Stars: Gérard Jugnot, Jean Rochefort, Sylvie Granotier
Genre: Comedy, Drama
Country: France
Michel Mortez is going to and fro France to compere a radio game he created 25 years ago. He is famous among the average Frenchmen. But he is also a poker. Rivetot, his assistant and technician, always goes with him. He is the only one to know what really lies under Mortez’s appearance of playful don Juan. When the programme is condemned by the managers, Rivetot delays as long as possible the moment he will have to announce it to Mortez… Both malicious and tender, this bitter comedy also shows nostalgia.
Director: Christine Edzard
Stars: Derek Jacobi, Alec Guinness, Joan Greenwood
Genre: Drama, Romance
Country: UK
Arthur returns to London after working abroad for many years with his now deceased father. Almost at once he becomes involved in the problems of his mother’s seamstress Amy and of her father residing in the Marshalsea debtors’ prison.
Director: Claude Chabrol
Stars: Philippe Noiret, Robin Renucci, Bernadette Lafont
Genre: Crime, Drama, Mystery
Country: France
Hired to write a biography of a television personality, a reporter spends a few days at the man’s country estate with the eccentric extended family.
Director: Lars von Trier
Stars: Allan De Waal, Ole Ernst, Michael Gelting
Genre: Drama, Horror
Country: Denmark
A director and screenwriter pen a script and, in the process, blur the line between fiction and reality.
Director: Vera Chytilová
Stars: Miroslav Machácek, Tomás Palatý, Stepánka Cervenková
Genre: Adventure, Drama, Horror
Country: Czechoslovakia
A group of teenagers are mysteriously invited to a skiing workshop in the mountains. There are eleven of them, but the camp supervisors insist that there should be only ten, and that one of them is an intruder.
Director: Alex Cox
Stars: Sy Richardson, Joe Strummer, Dick Rude
Genre: Action, Comedy, Western
Country: UK
A gang of bank robbers with a suitcase full of money go to the desert to hide out. After burying the loot, they find their way to a surreal town full of cowboys who drink an awful lot of coffee. The townspeople are hostile to the outsiders at first, but seem to accept them once they’ve killed a couple of people. After a while, a mysterious man named Dade arrives, who seems to have unpleasant business to settle with the robbers. A free-for-all shoot-em-up ensues.
Director: Tony Palmer
Stars: Ben Kingsley, Sherry Baines, Magdalen Asquith
Genre: Biography, Drama, History
Country: Netherlands | UK | Denmark | West Germany | Sweden
The story of the great Soviet Composer Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) and his life and career during the rule of Stalin.
Director: Goran Markovic
Stars: Mustafa Nadarevic, Anica Dobra, Milorad Mandic-Manda
Genre: Drama, Horror, Romance
Country: Yugoslavia | UK
Piano teacher is deeply traumatised by the events of his childhood, as well as by political oppression in his youth. Decades later, all those traumas lead to carnage.
Director: Barry Levinson
Stars: Richard Dreyfuss, Danny DeVito, Barbara Hershey
Genre: Comedy, Drama
Country: USA
A minor car accident drives two rival aluminum-siding salesmen to the ridiculous extremes of man versus man in 1963 Baltimore.
Director: Agnieszka Holland
Stars: Maria Chwalibóg, Boguslaw Linda, Pawel Witczak
Genre: Drama
Country: Poland
A story of a middle-aged woman, Irena, living alone on the outskirts of Wroclaw with her 8-year old son. They live in a drab apartment. She is a mail carrier and her son is her only pride and joy. She hardly communicates with anybody else in a humanly open and natural way. She also cares for a sick relative. One day when delivering a monthly pension to a crippled young miner Jacek, she faints at his doorsteps. Even though she is determined to live alone after divorcing her drunken first husband, she also knows that her boy needs a male figure to correct his bad habits. She also needs a man badly. The love affair between Jacek and Irena begins however their first physical encounter shatters them both.
Director: Atom Egoyan
Stars: David Hemblen, Aidan Tierney, Gabrielle Rose
Genre: Drama
Country: Canada
Van’s father, Stan, is fond of video, always taping scenes of daily family life. But he does not take care of Van’s grandmother, Armen. Although he could afford having her at home, she is spending her days watching TV in an old people’s home. Van often visits her. He meets Aline, whose mother is in the next bed. Van wants to get his grandma out of the old people’s home. Aline will help. Actually, Van, whose mother left, years ago, is looking for a real family life.
Director: Bill Forsyth
Stars: Christine Lahti, Sara Walker, Andrea Burchill
Genre: Comedy, Drama
Country: USA
After their mother commits suicide, two sisters end up living with their kind but peculiar aunt in their grandmother’s old house in a small 1950s town.
Director: Hector Babenco
Stars: Jack Nicholson, Meryl Streep, Carroll Baker
Genre: Drama
Country: USA
An alcoholic drifter spends Halloween in his home town of Albany, New York after returning there for the first time in decades.
Director: James Benning
Stars: Rhonda Bell, Elion Sucher
Genre: Crime, Drama
Country: USA
In “Landscape Suicide” Benning continues his examination of Americana through the stories of two murderers. Ed Gein was a Wisconsin farmer and multiple murderer who taxidermied his victims in the 1950s. Bernadette Prott was a California teenager who stabbed a friend to death over an insult in 1984. Benning’s distanced approach to such grisly material is as far removed as possible from sensationalism, however. Although the acts of murder are both bizarre and violent, Benning dwells on them only minimally, emphasizing instead the details of psychological motivation, which in both cases seem frighteningly mundane.
Director: Hsiao-Hsien Hou
Stars: Lin Yang, Fan Yang, Shu-Fen Hsin
Genre: Crime, Drama
Country: Taiwan
The eldest daughter of a broken and troubled family works to keep the family together and look after her younger siblings, who are slipping into a life of crime.
Director: Percy Adlon
Stars: Marianne Sägebrecht, CCH Pounder, Jack Palance
Genre: Comedy, Drama
Country: West Germany
A lonely German woman ends up in the most desolate motel on Earth and decides to make it brighter.
Director: Alan Parker
Stars: Mickey Rourke, Robert De Niro, Lisa Bonet
Genre: Horror, Mystery, Thriller
Country: UK | Canada | USA
A private investigator is hired by a man who calls himself Louis Cyphre to track down a singer named Johnny Favorite. But the investigation takes an unexpected and somber turn.
Director: Janusz Zaorski
Stars: Magda Teresa Wójcik, Zbigniew Zapasiewicz, Franciszek Pieczka
Genre: Drama, History, War
Country: Poland
Made in 1982, shelved for five years. Story opens with Lucja Krol’s husband under the tram. She gives birth to her fourth son on the floor of their new apartment. Neighbor Wiktor, a communist intellectual, befriends the poverty-stricken family but is soon arrested and sent to jail. During the war Lucja narrowly escapes a Nazi roundup at the black market. Her sons hold ardent Communist meetings in their apartment, with her blessing. Lucja works hard, but without complaint. After the war, Klemens is inexplicably arrested, accused by the new regime of being a collaborator.
Director: Les Blank
Stars: Teresa Peacock, Sherry Dorst, Tobe Melora Correal
Genre: Short, Documentary
Country: USA
A charming valentine to women born with a space between their teeth.
Director: Jûzô Itami
Stars: Nobuko Miyamoto, Tsutomu Yamazaki, Masahiko Tsugawa
Genre: Comedy, Crime
Country: Japan
If tax evasion is an art, wheeler-dealer Hideki Gondo is Rembrandt. And so, a determined taxing woman gets the tough assignment of trying to catch him.
Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski
Stars: Boguslaw Linda, Tadeusz Lomnicki, Zbigniew Zapasiewicz
Genre: Drama
Country: Poland
Witek runs after a train. Three variations follow on how such a seemingly banal incident could influence the rest of Witek’s life.
Director: Jack Gold
Stars: Alan Arkin, Joanna Pacula, Rutger Hauer
Genre: Drama, History, War
Country: UK | Yugoslavia
German death camp in Sobibor, Poland, killed two hundred fifty thousand Jews. It had the most successful prisoner escape in World War II on October 14, 1943.
Director: Werner Herzog
Stars: Klaus Kinski, King Ampaw, José Lewgoy
Genre: Adventure, Drama
Country: West Germany | Ghana
During the 1800s, paroled Brazilian bandit Cobra Verde is sent to West Africa with a few troops to man an old Portuguese fort and to convince the local African ruler to resume the slave trade with Brazil.
Director: Stan Brakhage
Stars: n/a
Genre: Animation, Short
Country: USA
Dante’s Divine Comedy depicted as thousands of abstract paintings by Stan Brakhage himself.
Director: Paul Hamann
Stars: Bobby Butler, Donald Cabana, Melanie Christopher
Genre: Documentary
Country: UK
Fourteen Days in May is a documentary film directed by Paul Hamann and originally shown on television by the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1987. The programme recounts the final days before the execution of Edward Earl Johnson, an American prisoner convicted of rape and murder and imprisoned in the Mississippi State Penitentiary. Johnson protested his innocence and claimed that his confession had been made under duress. He was executed in Mississippi’s gas chamber on 20 May 1987
Director: Kwon-taek Im
Stars: Soo-youn Kang, Gu-sun Lee, Yang-ha Yun
Genre: Drama
Country: South Korea
Shin, a nobleman, had been trying to conceive a male heir to pass his family name. Unable to provide a male heir, Shin’s wife gives her husband permission to search for a surrogate wife to bear a male heir. On the way to finding a surrogate wife, Shin runs into a 17 year old girl, Ok-nyo (Kang Soo-yeon). She was a poor feisty girl who stated she would do anything for money.
Director: Paul Newman
Stars: Joanne Woodward, John Malkovich, Karen Allen
Genre: Drama
Country: USA | Canada
A son longs to escape from his stifling home, where his genteel mother worries about the future prospects of his lame, shy sister.
Director: Stephen Frears
Stars: Shashi Kapoor, Claire Bloom, Frances Barber
Genre: Comedy, Drama, Romance
Country: UK
Sammy and Rosie are an unconventional couple. They live in the midst chaos, surround themselves with intellectual street people and sleep with everybody except each other. Things become interesting when Sammy’s father comes to visit.
Director: Pedro Almodóvar
Stars: Eusebio Poncela, Carmen Maura, Antonio Banderas
Genre: Comedy, Drama, Thriller
Country: Spain
A film maker has a fling with a homicidal possessive fan who threatens his true love and sister.
Director: Bille August
Stars: Pelle Hvenegaard, Max von Sydow, Erik Paaske
Genre: Drama
Country: Denmark | Sweden
When his wife dies, Lassefar (Max von Sydow) takes his 12-year-old son, Pelle (Pelle Hvenegaard), from their home in Sweden to Denmark in search of a better life. Signing on as laborers at a large farm, father and son undergo numerous trials, including prejudice against immigrants and run-ins with those more powerful than themselves in both the physical and the social sense. Over the course of a year, young Pelle learns what it takes to survive in a harsh and unforgiving world.
Director: Gillian Armstrong
Stars: Judy Davis, Jan Adele, Claudia Karvan
Genre: Drama
Country: Australia
Story about a backup singer for an Elvis impersonator who re-enters her past when she leaves a tour in a small town and finds her daughter in a mobile home park.
Director: Steven Spielberg
Stars: Christian Bale, John Malkovich, Miranda Richardson
Genre: Action, Drama, History
Country: USA
A young English boy struggles to survive under Japanese occupation during World War II.
Director: Stan Brakhage
Stars: Iona Bartek, Quay Bartek
Genre: Short
Country: USA
Refracted images, not unlike those in a funhouse mirror, display two children playing in a backyard, a boy and a girl. There’s a dog, a swing, a picket fence, a Big Wheels trike. The grass is green and lush. A soundtrack mixes a chorus, swelling strings, and a child vocalizing. The effect is to idealize the images.
Director: Aleksandr Sokurov
Stars: Andrei Tarkovsky, Tonino Guerra, Aleksandr Sokurov
Genre: Documentary
Country: Soviet Union
A film in homage to Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. It concentrates on his absence from the Soviet Union and what he left behind. There are episodes of his funeral and places he lived in Moscow.
Director: Stephen Quay, Timothy Quay
Stars: n/a
Genre: Animation, Documentary
Country: UK | USA
The Quays are American-born identical twin animators who work out of London but whose work has a strong Eastern European flavor.
Director: Mabel Cheung
Stars: Yun-Fat Chow, Cherie Chung, Danny Bak-Keung Chan
Genre: Drama, Romance
Country: Hong Kong
Filmed in New York, story of naive young woman from Hong Kong who goes to New York to study. Street-wise cabbie cousin takes care of her in the big city
Director: Luis Mandoki
Stars: Rachel Chagall, Liv Ullmann, Norma Aleandro
Genre: Drama, Romance
Country: USA | Mexico
The life of Gaby Brimmer, a girl physically handicapped, who finally gets her goals of study and triumph.
Director: Jack Clayton
Stars: Maggie Smith, Bob Hoskins, Wendy Hiller
Genre: Drama, Romance
Country: UK
A middle-aged spinster falls in love with a fellow resident of her boardinghouse, who mistakenly believes she has the money to help him start a new business.
Director: Robert Townsend
Stars: Robert Townsend, Craigus R. Johnson, Helen Martin
Genre: Comedy
Country: USA
An actor limited to stereotypical roles because of his ethnicity, dreams of making it big as a highly respected performer. As he makes his rounds, the film takes a satiric look at African American actors in Hollywood.
Director: Seijirô Kôyama
Stars: Tatsuya Nakadai, Kaoru Yachigusa, Toshinori Omi
Genre: Drama, Family
Country: Japan
The true story about a dog’s loyalty to its master, even after his death.
Director: John Carpenter
Stars: Donald Pleasence, Lisa Blount, Jameson Parker
Genre: Horror
Country: USA
A research team finds a mysterious cylinder in a deserted church. If opened, it could mean the end of the world.
Director: David Hugh Jones
Stars: Anne Bancroft, Anthony Hopkins, Judi Dench
Genre: Biography, Drama, Romance
Country: UK | USA
True story of a transatlantic business correspondence about used books that developed into a close friendship.
Director: Abbas Kiarostami
Stars: Babek Ahmed Poor, Ahmed Ahmed Poor, Khodabakhsh Defaei
Genre: Drama, Family
Country: Iran
An 8 year old boy must return his friend’s notebook he took by mistake, lest his friend be punished by expulsion from school.
Director: Jirí Barta
Stars: Frantisek Husák, Zdenek Martínek, Ivan Vojtek
Genre: Animation, Short, Crime
Country: Czechoslovakia
A sarcastic story about a thief who becomes the victim of his own victims. His victims come from the other world and take his most precious possession – his blood. The phantasmal atmosphere of the film is achieved through artificial animation coloring in a motion picture.
Director: Chris Hegedus, D.A. Pennebaker
Stars: Otis Redding, Booker T. & the M.G.s, Steve Cropper
Genre: Documentary, Short, Music
Country: USA
Documentary on Otis Redding’s performance at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival.
Director: Jeremy Kagan
Stars: Peter Boyle, Elliott Gould, James Avery
Genre: Documentary, Drama, History
Country: USA
A made-for-cable-TV docudrama about the trial of the men accused of conspiring to cause protesters to riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Combines in an innovative manner dramatic recreations (largely faithful to the actual trial transcripts) with documentary footage and interviews with the actual defendants.
Director: Paul Cox
Stars: John Hurt, Marika Rivera, Gabriella Trsek
Genre: Animation, Biography, Drama
Country: Australia | Belgium
This documentary, on the life of artist Vincent Van Gogh, is told through his letters to his brother Theo, from 1872 until his tragic death. We gain first hand insight into the man, his motivations, and his humanity.
Director: Paolo Taviani, Vittorio Taviani
Stars: Vincent Spano, Joaquim de Almeida, Greta Scacchi
Genre: Drama, Romance, War
Country: Italy | France | USA
After the bankruptcy of their father’s stonemasonry firm, Nicola and Andrea emigrate to America to restore their fortunes. After many adventures and near-disasters, they end up in Hollywood designing sets for D.W. Griffith and marry beautiful actresses, but tragedy strikes with the arrival of World War I, which finds the brothers fighting on opposite sides…
Director: Prince, Albert Magnoli
Stars: Prince, Sheila E., Sheena Easton
Genre: Documentary, Music
Country: USA | Canada
A concert film with theatrical staging, featuring live performances by Prince and his band.
Director: Bill Couturié
Stars: Tom Berenger, Ellen Burstyn, J. Kenneth Campbell
Genre: Documentary, History, War
Country: USA
A documentary featuring letters written by U.S. soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines during the Vietnam War to their families and friends back home. Archive footage of the war and news coverage thereof, augment the first-person “narrative” by men and women who were in the war, some of whom did not survive it.
Director: Peter Greenaway
Stars: Brian Dennehy, Chloe Webb, Lambert Wilson
Genre: Drama
Country: UK | Italy
An architect supervising an exhibition starts to have mysterious stomach pains while his life slowly falls apart.
Director: Pat O’Connor
Stars: Colin Firth, Kenneth Branagh, John Atkinson
Genre: Drama
Country: UK
Five centuries ago, a mural was created in a country church in the north of England, and then hidden under layers of white paint. Looking at it again will be a distraction, the Reverend Mr. Keach tells World War I veteran Tom Birken, who will spend a month in the country restoring the mural. Another veteran, James Moon, is looking for the grave of an ancestor of the patroness of the church who fought in the Crusades. The rector’s wife, Alice, comes to see the mural and later visits Birken’s bell tower abode, bringing a basket of apples. Will she open the book in which he has pressed the yellow rose she gave him earlier?
Director: Laurens C. Postma
Stars: David Cronenberg, Jeff Goldblum, Stephen King
Genre: Documentary, Biography
Country: UK
Documentary about the career of director David Cronenberg, with clips from his films and interviews with friends, colleagues, film critics and Cronenberg himself.
Director: Lindsay Anderson
Stars: Bette Davis, Lillian Gish, Vincent Price
Genre: Drama
Country: USA
Two aged sisters reflect on life and the past during a late summer day in Maine.