The Big Steal

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The Big Steal is an action-packed crime film starring Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer. Directed by Don Siegel, The Big Steal defies easy categorization. It’s not so much a film-noir as it is a hard-boiled crime film, loaded with crisp dialogue, witty and sarcastic banter between the leads.Duke Halliday (Mitchum) arrives in Mexico in search of army payroll cash that he alleges was stolen by Jim Fiske (Patric Knowles). He runs into Joan Graham (Greer), who is after the money she gave to her boyfriend, Fiske. The two attempt to track down Fiske, all the while being pursued by the U.S. Army Captain Vincent Blake (William Bendix). It may not be one of Mitchum’s iconic roles, but he’s really quite good here. As for Greer, she’s no femme fatale in this. She’s just a strong woman along for the ride. It was shot on location around Mexico City, which helps give it a more exotic look. This film is sort of like a mixture of film noir, and adventure film, a comedy and it’s all set in Mexico. Don Siegel masterfully directs this fast-paced, well-constructed and highly enjoyable road chase film noir that stretches the genre’s conventions.

Glory (Slava)

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Glory is a 2016 Bulgarian drama film written and directed by Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov. The film plays like a parable that keeps expanding its themes. Solitary railway worker Tsanko (Stefan Denolyubov) discovers a pile of cash in the middle of the tracks, but instead of taking the cash, he informs the authorities. Workaholic publicity executive Julia (Margita Gosheva), takes the oppurtunity to hide a corruption scandal by holding a ceremony to hail Tsanko as a hero. At the conference, she bullies him to remove his watch, to put on the crappy digital one he’s awarded for being an honest citizen. At the conference, when Petrov insists that he knows why the national company is suffering huge financial losses,the minister ignores him. When he wakes up the next morning, the gift no longer works. When Tsanko calls the administration to get it back, Julia tries to shrug him off. Hailed as a hero by the government, the bewildered Tsanko’s experience becomes the pawn of a bureaucratic agenda. Dashing between meetings and phone calls, Julia tries to satisfy her husband attempting embryonic fertilization therapy, even as she remains uncertain about motherhood. Gosheva’s performance brilliantly conveys that divided state. Gosheva plays the part to the hilt, never seeking to soften the character. Glory displays the distance between the corrupt authorities and the hardworking employees of the state superbly. The screenplay written by the two directors together with Decho Taralezhkov finds an interesting way of making the two worlds collide.

 

 

Mother (Ema)

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Smartly crafted mystery film set in a small town of Estonia where everyone is thinking of something big. Elsa (Tina Malberg), the mother forced to give up her job to care for her unconscious teacher son Lauri (Slim Maten). Stuck in a dull marriage with Arvo (Andres Tabun), she’s been having an affair with Aarne (Andres Noormets).  In between confessions and tears, Lauri’s friends, girlfriend, admirers and the town’s local policemen all ask the same questions: who shot him and why? And where is that money he withdrew shortly before his attack? Elsa’s life is, in short, not her own. It is claustrophobic, suffocated, and determined by the demands of the men around her. One by one, people knock on the door to come visit him. Each character sits by his bed,talking to him. This includes Lauri’s friend Andres (Jaak Prints), whose failing company needed a cash influx; girlfriend Liina (Katrin Kalma); and his student lover Riin (Rea Lest), perhaps the only person not interested in the missing money. But as the police inquiry into the crime progresses, some of his closest ties are interrogated. Unfolding at a rapid pace, Mother is structured as an episodic series of house visits to the unconscious Lauri, and mostly played for deadpan comedy with lightly noir-ish touches that darken as the plot grows thick. Director Kadri Kõusaar carefully wrote a script that slowly pieces together the truth behind Lauri’s shooting through his visitors’ confessionals to the comatose protagonist.

Rebel Without A Cause

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Directed by Nicholas Ray, it offers both social commentary and an alternative to previous films showing wrongdoers in urban rural locations. The title was taken from Robert M. Lindner’s  1944 book, Rebel Without a Cause: The Hypnoanalysis of a Criminal Psychopath. The film itself, however, does not reference  Lindner’s  book in any way.  Rebel Without a Cause is a look into the life of Jim Stark (James Dean) and his attempt to try and figure out what he wants to do with his life. After being taken to the police station his parents are brought in to help find out what he did. . His parents (Jim Backus and Ann Doran) are unsure what to do with him. Also at the station is Judy (Natalie Wood) and John “Plato” Crawford (Sal Mineo). Jim offers his coat to Plato but he refuses.  The next day is Jim’s first day at his high school. It is hear where he encounters Buzz, the leader of the “cool” crowd. Buzz and his gang slash the tires of Jim’s cars and a fight starts. The boys decide to settle their differences by having a ‘chicken run.’  During it, Buzz is killed when he is unable to escape from his car in time. Jim’s parents are kindly and liberal, but are too indulgent. Judy starts off as a member of the ‘ cool crowd’, as she is Buzz’s girlfriend, but after Buzz’s death a romance develops between Jim and herself.

The main theme of the film is the choice between the desire to conform to accepted values and the desire to rebel by finding one’s own individual ones, a choice that  seems legitimate in one’s teenage years. The film suggests that this choice is more complex than might be thought. Throughout the film there is an atmosphere of heightened emotion. It is a film that needs fine acting, both to convey this emotional atmosphere and to do justice to its ambitious theme. Sal Mineo as Plato and Natalie Wood as Judy are both good, but James Dean is better than good, making the tormented figure of Jim come vividly alive.

Ma nuit chez maud (My Night at Maud’s)

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My night at maud’s is a 1969 French film directed by Eric Rohmer. It is the third film in his series of six moral tales. In this film, an introverted Catholic enginner (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is introduced by his Marxist friend Vidal (Antoine Vitez) to Maud (Francoise Fabian), a charming middle-aged woman and ends up staying the night in her apartment. They spend the evening talking about philosophy and religion, particularly about their different views on Pascal and his wager.  Pascal offered a pragmatic reason for believing in god : even under the assumption that god’s existence is unlikely, the benefits of believing are so vast as to make betting on theism rational. If god does exist, then our lives gain meaning and our reward is eternal. The three main characters are an interesting study in contrast. Vidal sees the wager as a logical tool for explaining everything, from religion to politics. For Jean-Louis, Pascal is too strict, a man who has sacrificed sensual pleasure.
Maud believes in the supremacy of love. After Vidal leaves, Maud tells Jean-Louis about her marriage, her ex-husband’s Catholic mistress, and the tragic end to her affair with the only man she loved. The girl that Jean-Louis is currently chasing is 22 year old Francoise ((Maire-Christine Barrault) a blonde,catholic girl that he has seen at church. They too fence with words as they try to mislead and reveal at the same time, and the audience is intrigued. Jean-louis is conflicted between his Catholic principles and his love of sensual pleasure.  He lives in a world centered on himself, involving in much philosophizing about choice but never choosing. Once Vidal leaves, Jean-Louis stays the night. Maud effortlessly engages Jean-Louis in a game of intellectual chess, provoking him with his own illusions about love. On the surface, the film appears very simple but underneath there is much complexity. Rohmer’s approach has often been called literary. He combines his intellectual interests with an intense examination of everyday life.

Confessions

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Confessions is a 2010 Japanese revenge drama directed by Tetsuya Nakashima, based on housewife-turned-author Kanae Minato’s 2008 mystery novel. High school teacher Moriguchi (Takato Matsu) announces in her class that she will resign shortly. Her young daughter was murdered by students identified in her class. She not only reveals the murderers’ identity but also explains how she plans to take revenge on those students. This leads to serious repercussions for some of the pupils. Twists and turns in the story then unfold for the viewer as we are retold further confessions to piece it all together. The story is told through confessions of various characters in the film, sometimes repeating the same event from different perspectives. Everyone expresses their own hopes and despair,sadness and hatred. The fast narratives combined with hauntingly beautiful slow motion imagery and mesmerizing background music gave this film an eerie atmosphere. The “blue” look and the ominous, monotonous soundtrack just adds to the film’s darkness.  Matsu Takako gave a superb performance in the lead role. Her control of emotion was perfect in the first half as a ruthless teacher who suffers from tremendous pain. In the second half, her character breaks down a couple of times. Confessions is a dark revenge drama that works quite well because of how the director structures the story. The film does falter slightly, though, from some overdone and contorted scenes drawing dangerously close to being gimmicky.

Invasion of the body snatchers

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Invasion of the body snatchers is a 1978 science fiction horror film directed by Philip Kaufman. Released on December 1978, it is a remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), which is based on the novel The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney. The film follows many of the same plot points as the original, save for it is two  decades later, and set in the big city of San Francisco, rather than a small town.  The film follows Matthew (Donald Sutherland) a San Francisco health inspector who soon finds out, along with his co-worker Elizabeth (Brooke Adams), that an alien plague of pods has descended, and that people are being replaced by duplicates grown from them. As the pods grow, they replace their victims as they sleep, and suck out their memories and bodily fluids, leaving the original person a dried shell. The first person, in the film, to be podded is Elizabeth’s boyfriend Dr. Howell, a dentist. When he seems distant, it leads Elizabeth to the conspiracy, and into the arms of Matthew, who is secretly in love with her. He suggests she see his friend, David Kibner (Leonard Nimoy), a famous psychiatrist with best selling helpful books.

This film works because of a constant sense of paranoia. This paranoia begins to spread like wildfire as several citizens notice a bit of the same. Where the protagonists in Siegel’s film  were well-to-do and crisply dressed, the characters in the 78 version are engagingly odd.  Unlike the original, the film’s memorable for its use of outlandish special effects. In one startling scene, Brooke Adams is menaced by a dog with the head of a man. The 1978 Body Snatchers is most memorable, however, for the pod people’s habit of pointing and screaming at human escapees. It’s a trait that wasn’t exhibited by the eerily calm invaders of the earlier film, and its use here is absolutely terrifying. The typical unusual ’70’s cinematography is from Michael Chapman. There are some really exciting chase scenes at the end of the film. One of the greatest aspects of this film is its socio-political resonance. It can be interpreted as a state of minority versus majority, us versus them and individualism versus social conformity. The film has a dark brooding atmosphere throughout and there is a sense of realism in this film.

Raman Raghav 2.0

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Raman Raghav was a psychopathic serial killer who operated in the city of Mumbai in the mid 1960s. His real name was Sindhi Dalwai. All the murders took place at night and were committed using a hard object. He also raped his sister before killing her.  This film is not about him. The electrifying atmosphere at the night club that follows instantly takes the audiences in the trance for a gut wrenching, dark, intense thriller about a killer and a policeman that brings in different shades of evil and inhumanity.  Nawaz, who plays the notorious serial-killer Raman, is inspired by the real-life serial-killer, Raman Raghav. The screenplay follows his exploits as he steers the bylanes, slums, and rundown apartments of Mumbai, piling on the bodies and indulging his dark fantasies.  Vicky Kaushal (Raghav) plays the DCP of the Mumbai Police Force . Kaushal is as emotionally bare as Nawaz, with the only difference being that they emotional voids are targeted at the opposite spectrums of the law. He’s an addict to the core, and has no apologies about being one just like Nawaz has none about his murderous wrongdoings.

Raman calls himself Sindhi Dalwai and finds a partner in Raghav. Through eight chapters- Locked Man, The Sister, The Policeman, The Hunter, The Hunted, The Son, The Fallen and Soulmates – Kashyap builds his characters to a tall dark shadow that scares us out of our wits.  Nowhere does the camera focus on a smashed, bloodied head yet the way with which Nawaz carries out each murder is gory and makes you want shut your eyes. The camera work is also crisp as  it travels to murky bylanes of Mumbai with as much ease as it captures the city’s impressive skyline at night. Siddiqiui is appropriately creepy as Raman, a long scar running down his forehead, an unmistakable glitter in his eyes. While not as spine-chilling as his more counterpart, Kaushal holds up his end impressively.  Both Ramanna and Raghav are also creatures bred and brought up in patriarchy, are victims of it ( Raghav’s submissive equation with his dad for instance) yet preserving its deep misogyny. Some sequences stand out. Ramanna holding his sister’s family hostage brings out his sick mind in an anxious  way possible. Raman Raghav 2.0 is a taut thriller, full of energy and overflowing with tension.

The 39 Steps

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The 39 Steps has the classic Hitchcockian theme of an average, innocent man caught up in extraordinary events which are quite beyond his control. Over a span of four days, the smart and unflappable protagonist, Richard Hannay (Robert Donat) is involved in a circular journey to prove his innocence and expose the hive of intrigue. The opening of the film, the first three shots do not show him above his neck. With his back to the camera, he is followed down the aisle to his seat. He is then assumed to be lost in the crowd. This gives the audience the feeling that he could be anybody. During a music hall brawl, Hannay agrees when a mysterious woman asks if she can go home with him. He takes her to his flat.   There, she tells him that she is a spy, being chased by assassins. Later that night she gets murdered and the man stands accused. En route, he has many adventures as he flees across the South Scotland landscapes, including being handcuffed to a woman (Madeline Carroll) who happens to think he is guilty of the murder. Donat is a charming lead and he plays it well. Carroll is well used as the traditional blonde cast by Hitchcock, she is a little disorganized but she is a match for Donat in early scenes. The 39 Steps stands out because it was one of the Master of Suspense’s first “talkies”; like any artist trying something new, his strokes are at once nervous and brash, and his motifs wonderfully contradictory.  It was made at a time when film-makers were experimenting with sound, yet Hitchcock uses silence to heighten the tension.

 

Inherit The Wind

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Inherit the wind is a fictionalized story of the 1925 famous “Monkey” trial. The trial took place in Dayton, Tennessee, in 1925. The trial did put a young high school teacher named John T. Scopes prohibiting the teaching of any theory that denied the biblical account of divine creation. Scopes was defended by the legendary Clarence Darrow, and the prosecution was led by three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan. Darrow’s expenses were paid by the Baltimore Sun papers, home of the famous journalist H.L. Mencken. In Stanley Kramer’s film, Darrow becomes Henry Drummond (Spencer Tracy), Bryan is Matthew Harrison Brady (Fredric March), Mencken is E.K. Hornbeck (Gene Kelly), and Scopes is Bertram T. Cates (Dick York). Certainly most of the citizens in the film’s fictional town of Hillsboro, Tenn, believe in the literal truth of Genesis. “There’s only one man in this town who thinks at all,” Drummond roars, “and he’s in jail. ” The judge clearly admires Brady, even addressing him as “Colonel” in court. Drummond objects to this, so, as a result, the mayor reluctantly makes him a “temporary” colonel just for these proceedings. March and Tracy bring the full force of their talents to their roles as opposing lawyers (and one time friends) who face off on the issue of evolution vs. creation.The film features an iconic performance by Spencer Tracy. Florence Eldridge, March’s real life wife, is excellent as March’s film wife who recognizes the flaws in her husband, but loves and admires him anyways. March is at turns witty, cunning, over-the-top, hammy or contrite, depending upon the demands of the scene. His scenes on the witness stand with Tracy are among the best written and beautifully acted pieces in film history.What Kramer so effectively captured in the tightly shot film — was the intense claustrophobia and choking heat of the setting, the barely contained violence this conflict engendered.