mervyn-verstellung's - Favourites List

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Struggling street food vendor Sentaro finds himself confronted with Tokue, an odd but sympathetic elderly lady looking for work.

When he reluctantly accepts, it's not long before Tokue proves to have an extraordinary gift when it comes to making "an" - the sweet red bean paste filling used in his dorayakis - which starts a relationship that is about much more than just street food. With 'Sweet Bean', Kawase again focuses on people at the periphery of Japanese society and investigates their place in the flow of life itself.

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Formed in 1970, Kraftwerk's contribution to the development of electronic music remains unsurpassed.

Having inspired everyone from Bowie to Joy Division to Radiohead, this mysterious collective has also proven responsible for entire genres to emerge - electronica, techno and synth-pop to name but three. This video reviews the career and music of Kraftwerk, from their inception in the late 1960's through their most celebrated period in the mid-1970's, culminating with their resurgence during the 1980's. The film further explores how Kraftwerk both fitted into and pulled away from the electronic wing of what is often lazily referred to as 'Krautrock'. Showing respect too for many of the groups German contemporaries from a similar impulse, and tracing the unfolding of electronics in German contemporary music generally, this programme presents a fascinating story previously untold on film. Featuring exclusive and extensive interviews with ex-Kraftwerk members - Karl Bartos and Klaus Röder, German ambient and electronic musicians - Dieter Moebius, Hans Joachim Rodelius, Klaus Schulze, Wolfgang Siedel, Conrad Schnitzler, Klaus Löhmer and many others. Also boasting further contributions from Electronic music experts and writers, and rare studio and live footage of the band, these all together make for perhaps the best film on the subject ever to emerge.

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The film paints the relationship between L.S. Lowry (Timothy Spall), one of Britain's most iconic artists, and his mother Elizabeth (Vanessa Redgrave), with whom he lived until her death. We see Lowry in the beginnings of his career, as he yearns for his work to be appreciated in London.

However, his disdainful mother actively tries to dissuade her bachelor son from pursuing his artistic ambitions. At the same time, the film explores how Elizabeth is the very reason Lowry paints anything at all, as he desperately seeks to create something, anything, which will make her happy. This powerful yet humorous story imagines the impact this obsessive mother and son relationship had on the great artist.

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A love story about divorce. A marriage coming apart and a family coming together. 'Marriage Story' is a hilarious and harrowing, sharply observed and deeply compassionate film from the acclaimed writer-director Noah Baumbach.

Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson deliver tour-de-force performances as Charlie, a charismatic New York theater director wedded to his work, and Nicole, an actor, who is ready to change her own life. Their hopes for an amicable divorce fade as they are drawn into a system that pits them against each other and forces them to redefine their relationship and their family. Featuring bravura, finely drawn supporting turns from Alan Alda, Ray Liotta, and Laura Dern - who won an Academy Award for her performance here - as the trio of lawyers who preside over the legal battle, 'Marriage Story' (nominated for six Academy Awards including best picture) is a work of both intimacy and scope that ultimately invokes hope amid the ruins.

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The summer of his high school freshman year, Hodaka (voice of Kotaro Daigo) runs away from his remote island home to Tokyo, and quickly finds himself pushed to his financial and personal limits. The weather is unusually gloomy and rainy every day, as if to suggest his future.

He lives his days in isolation, but finally finds work as a writer for a mysterious occult magazine. Then one day, Hodaka meets Hina (voice of Nana Mori) on a busy street corner. This bright and strong-willed girl possesses a strange and wonderful ability: the power to stop the rain and clear the sky...

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Set in the early 1950's, the film charts an imagined chapter in the life of Jackson (Elisabeth Moss), who has recently become a literary sensation.

When her philandering professor husband (Michael Stuhlbarg) invites a newlywed couple into their home, the reclusive writer is forced to change her routine, which heightens tensions in their already tempestuous household. This change acts as a catalyst, sparking inspiration for the anxiety-prone writer. As she becomes enamoured with Rose (Odessa Young), her unsuspecting new muse, Shirley's obsession plunges her into a quasi-delirium, awakening a repressed femininity that could inspire her next masterpiece.

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Live-in nurse Maud (Morfydd Clark) arrives to help Amanda (Jennifer Ehle), a famous dancer now frail from illness in her grand, isolated house.

Amanda is intrigued by the religious young woman, distracting her from her failing health, and Maud is bewitched by her patient, but she is not what she seems...Tormented by a violent secret from her past and ecstatic messages she believes are from God, Maud becomes convinced she was sent to Amanda not as a nurse, but as a divine saviour. As her grip on reality weakens, Maud is determined to save Amanda's soul, by any means necessary.

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In Taipei City, a cavernous old picture palace is about to close its doors forever. A meagre audience, the remaining few staff, and perhaps even a ghost or two, watch King Hu's wuxia classic Dragon Inn - each haunted by memories and desires evoked by cinema itself.

An exquisite, wryly funny and tender tribute to the experience of movie-going, Tsai Ming-Liang's poignant love letter to cinema is one of the most beguiling and beloved dramas of modern times and is now widely regarded as a classic.

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Lazzaro (talented newcomer Adriano Tardiolo) is a beautiful peasant whose sweet nature makes people mistake him for simple-minded. He happily does the bidding of anyone in his local village, which is ruled over by the evil Marchesa (Nicoletta Braschi).

He finds an unlikely friend in the Marchesa's petulant son Tancredi (Tommaso Ragno / Luca Chikovani), who convinces his hapless ally to help him stage a dramatic incident to secure a ransom. 'Happy as Lazzaro' follows the adventures of this young man living on the margins of his society, who can seemingly travel through time, arriving in the big city and appearing as a fragment of the past lost in the modern world.

Willie (John Lurie), a Hungarian emigre living in New York City, is disgruntled by the arrival of his sixteen-year-old cousin Eva (Eszter Balint). Along with his pal Eddie (Richard Edson), they take a journey through the American landscape, never really settling on a direction.

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When Lady Sandra Abbott (Imelda Staunton) discovers that her husband is having an affair, she seeks refuge with her estranged, bohemian sister Bif (Celia Imrie). As a fish out of water, Sandra is at odds with her sister's free-spirited lifestyle, until she is persuaded to join Bif's dance class.

Here, Bif and her friends Charlie (Timothy Spall), Jackie (Joanna Lumley) and Ted (David Hayman) show Sandra that retirement is in fact only the beginning, and that divorce might just give her a whole new lease of life and love.

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Growing up in a new-town tower block at the tail end of the 1960's isn't easy for awkward adolescent schoolgirl Wynne (Jenny Agutter). She has a bad case of puppy love for her much older foster brother, George (Bryan Marshall).

And to add to her anguish, might he even be the crazed killer of teenage girls known to prowl the woods nearby?

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Three ill-fated men - a small-time pimp Jack (John Lurie) an unemployed DJ Zack (Tom Waits) and a strong-willed Italian tourist (Roberto Benigni) - meet in the confined space of New Orleans prison cell.

Undeterred by Jack and Zack's evident disdain, Roberto shares with them his improbable plans of escape, thrusting them into an adventure through the Louisiana bayous.

When elderly mother Edna (Robyn Nevin), inexplicably vanishes, her daughter Kay (Emily Mortimer) and granddaughter Sam (Bella Heathcote) rush to their family's decaying country home. When Edna returns her behaviour is strangely volatile.

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Based on the classic novella by Thomas Mann, this late-career masterpiece from Luchino Visconti is a meditation on the nature of art, the allure of beauty, and the inescapability of death.

A fastidious composer reeling from a disastrous concert, Gustav von Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde, in an exquisitely nuanced performance) travels to Venice to recover. There, he is struck by a vision of pure beauty in the form of a young boy named Tadzio (Bjorn Andrcscn), his infatuation developing into an obsession even as rumors of a plague spread through the city. Setting Mann's story of queer desire and bodily decay against the sublime music of Gustav Mahler, 'Death in Venice' is one of cinemas most exalted literary adaptations, as sensually rich as it is allegorically resonant.