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1984
: :Michael Radford's adaption of George Orwell's foreboding literary premonition casts John Hurt and Suzanna Hamilton as lovers who must keep their courtship secret. Aside from criminalizing sex and interpersonal relationships, the ruling party in their country Oceania both fabricates reality and reconstructs history for the sake of oppressing the masses. They brainwash their citizens via large, propaganda-spewing TV monitors installed in their living rooms, which also inspect everyone's activities. Hurt and Hamilton are among the few we see desperately trying to fight the system by keeping control of their thoughts and ...
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Shake Hands With the Devil
: :Michael Radford's adaption of George Orwell's foreboding literary premonition casts John Hurt and Suzanna Hamilton as lovers who must keep their courtship secret. Aside from criminalizing sex and interpersonal relationships, the ruling party in their country Oceania both fabricates reality and reconstructs history for the sake of oppressing the masses. They brainwash their citizens via large, propaganda-spewing TV monitors installed in their living rooms, which also inspect everyone's activities. Hurt and Hamilton are among the few we see desperately trying to fight the system by keeping control of their thoughts and ...
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Harold & Maude (Aniv)
: essential video:Black comedies don't come much blacker than this cult favorite from 1972, and they don't come much funnier, either. It seemed that director Hal Ashby was the perfect choice to mine a mother lode of eccentricity from the original script by Colin Higgins, about the unlikely romance between a death-obsessed 19-year-old named Harold (Bud Cort) and a life-loving 79-year-old widow named Maude (Ruth Gordon). They meet at a funeral, and Maude finds something oddly appealing about Harold, urging him to 'reach out' and grab life by the lapels as ...
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The Devil's Widow (Tam Lin)
: essential video:Black comedies don't come much blacker than this cult favorite from 1972, and they don't come much funnier, either. It seemed that director Hal Ashby was the perfect choice to mine a mother lode of eccentricity from the original script by Colin Higgins, about the unlikely romance between a death-obsessed 19-year-old named Harold (Bud Cort) and a life-loving 79-year-old widow named Maude (Ruth Gordon). They meet at a funeral, and Maude finds something oddly appealing about Harold, urging him to 'reach out' and grab life by the lapels as ...
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Day of the Jackal
: essential video:With its high-intensity plot about an attempt to assassinate French President Charles de Gaulle, the bestselling novel by Frederick Forsyth was a prime candidate for screen adaptation. Director Fred Zinnemann brought his veteran skills to bear on what has become a timeless classic of screen suspense. Not to be confused with the later remake The Jackal starring Bruce Willis (which shamelessly embraced all the bombast that Zinnemann so wisely avoided), this 1973 thriller opts for lethal elegance and low-key tenacity in the form of the Jackal, the suave assassin ...
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Little Dorrit - Part Two: Little Dorrit's Story
:Description:The trials & tribulations of a young woman born & raised in debtor's prison provides the basis for this two-part adaptation of a Charles Dickens novel.
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Little Dorrit - Part One : Nobody's Fault
:Description:The trials & tribulations of a young woman born & raised in debtor's prison provides the basis for this two-part adaptation of a Charles Dickens novel.
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Peter Brook's King Lear
: :Movie description: Director Peter Brook's adaptation of Shakespeare's towering play. The film stars Paul Scofield ('A Man For All Seasons') as a harrowing, mythic King Lear, a great, gray beast of a man lumbering toward the Void, a king mired in his own folly and in the duplicity of a world he thought he could control. Lear's daughters are stunningly cast: Goneril (Irene Worth), Regan (Susan Engel), and Cordelia (Anne-Lise Gabold). Director Brook chose to shoot his exteriors on Denmark's Jutland Peninsula, a visually staunch and bleak environment, and to ...
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The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
: :John le Carre's classic spy yarn gets a suitably brisk, unromanticized telling in this quintessential Cold War movie. A British agent (Richard Burton) sets up an elaborate cover story for being lured into defecting to the Communists, but he hardly needs to manufacture his disgust and cynicism over spying. The grim business of point-counterpoint espionage has rarely been depicted with less glamour; Burton's great climactic speech on the subject is the definitive take on sinking to the level of the enemy. Claire Bloom is an offbeat love interest, and a bearded ...
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Danny Champion on the World
: :John le Carre's classic spy yarn gets a suitably brisk, unromanticized telling in this quintessential Cold War movie. A British agent (Richard Burton) sets up an elaborate cover story for being lured into defecting to the Communists, but he hardly needs to manufacture his disgust and cynicism over spying. The grim business of point-counterpoint espionage has rarely been depicted with less glamour; Burton's great climactic speech on the subject is the definitive take on sinking to the level of the enemy. Claire Bloom is an offbeat love interest, and a bearded ...
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