Whilst touring in France, a young couple (Rex and Saskia) stop for a break at a roadside service station. Saskia (Johanna ter Steege) leaves Rex (Gene Bervoets) to browse around the shops and vanishes leaving no clues as to her whereabouts. Three years later Rex begins to receive taunting postcards from Saskia's supposed abductor and is drawn into a terrifying battle of cat and mouse in his desperate quest to discover the fate of his missing lover.
Bergman's masterpiece of self-doubt, identity and eroticism is an audacious example of cinematic art. The notional story centres on newly mute actor Elisabet (Liv Ullmann) recuperating at her coastal holiday home in the care of a nurse, Alma (Bibi Andersson). As tensions between the pair grow, their very selves seem to blur, chronology becomes uncertain and what is real and unreal loses significance. Yet the true impact of Persona goes beyond mere storytelling, touching, as Bergman said, 'wordless secrets that only the cinema can discover'.
Professional photographer Thomas saw nothing. And he saw everything. Enlargements of pictures he secretly took of a romantic couple in the park reveal a murder in progress. Or do they? Blowup is an influential, stylish study of paranoid intrigue and disorientation. It is also a time capsule of mod London, a mindscape of the era's fashions, free love, parties, music (Herbie Hancock wrote the score and The Yardbirds riff at a club) and hip langour. David Hemmings plays the jaded photog enlivened by the mystery in his photos. Vanessa Redgrave is the elusive woman pictured in them. And the enigma of what you see, what you don't see and what the camera sees is yours to solve.
With her Oscar-winning turn in 'Klute', Jane Fonda reinvented herself as a new kind of movie star. Bringing nervy audacity and counterculture style to the role of Bree Daniels - a call girl and aspiring actor who becomes the focal point of a missing-person investigation when detective John Klute (Donald Sutherland) turns up at her door - Fonda made the film her own, putting an independent woman and escort on-screen with a frankness that had not yet been attempted in Hollywood. Suffused with paranoia by the conspiracy-thriller specialist Alan J. Pakula, and lensed by master cinematographer Gordon Willis, 'Klute' is a character study thick with dread, capturing the mood of early-1970's New York and the predicament of a woman trying to find her own way on the fringes of society.
David Fincher's 'The Social Network' is the stunning tale of a new breed of cultural insurgent: a punk genius who sparked a revolution and changed the face of human interaction for a generation, and perhaps forever. Shot through with emotional brutality and unexpected humour, this superbly crafted film chronicles the formation of Facebook and the battles over ownership that followed upon the website's unfathomable success. With a complex, incisive screenplay by Aaron Sorkin and a brilliant cast including Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield and Justin Timberlake, 'The Social Network' bears witness to the birth of an idea that rewove the fabric of society even as it unravelled the friendship of its creators.
Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) is truly living the high life. Flying all over the world on business, he never stops moving until he meets Alex (Vera Farmiga), a fellow passenger and learns that life isn't about the journey, but the connections we make along the way. Acclaimed by critics and audiences everywhere, 'Up in the Air' is light and dark, hilarious and tragic, bouncy and brainy, romantic and real.
In September 1944, flush with success after the Normandy Invasion, the Allies confidently launched Operation Market Garden, a wild scheme intended to put an early end to the fighting by invading Germany and smashing the Reich's war plants. But a combination of battlefield politics, faulty intelligence, bad luck and even worse weather led to disaster beyond the Allies' darkest fears.
Academy Award® winner Kate Winslet delivers a dynamic performance in this tale of eroticism, secrecy and guilt set in turbulent post-Nazi Germany. Bringing to life the celebrated international novel, Winslet is riveting as Hannah Schmitz; a lonely, working-class woman who experiences a brief but intense affair with a teenage boy. Years later they meet again; Hannah now a defendant in a notorious case and her ex-lover, now a law student, holding the secret to her salvation.
As long as young hearts endure, so will National Velvet and movies like it. In her starmaking role, Elizabeth Taylor plays Velvet Brown, a wide-eyed adolescent who, assisted by her jockey pal (Mickey Rooney), trains Pie, a horse she won in a raffle, for the Grand National Steeplechase. Of course, no girl can ride in the National, can she? Yet Velvet, posing as a boy, assuredly does.
Not only is Thoroughly Modern Millie a zany romantic spoof of the Roaring Twenties, it's a musical that won an Oscar for Best Original Music Score! Julie Andrews stars as Millie, an innocent country girl who comes to the big city in search of a husband. Along the way she becomes the secretary of the rich and famous Trevor Graydon (John Gavin), befriends the sweet Miss Dorothy (Mary Tyler Moore), fights off white slaver Mrs. Meers (Beatrice Lillie) and hooks up with a lively paper clip salesman, Jimmy (James Fox). In the end it takes a rich and nutty jazz baby like Muzzy (Carol Channing) to unravel all these complications, give a great party, and match up lovers.
Holidaying in Barbados in the hope of overcoming the unhappiness of a broken love affair, Englishwoman Judith Farrow (Julie Andrews) meets debonair Russian Feodor Sverdlov (Omar Sharif). As they explore the island paradise together and their mutual feelings grow, so too do the suspicions of the intelligence agencies in both London and Moscow. In a world where no-one is to be trusted and appearances can be fatally deceptive, every move they make is being watched...
Driving Miss Daisy stars Jessica Tandy and Morgan Freeman in a simple but compelling story. Opening in 1948, when Miss Daisy (Jessica Tandy), an elderly widow, backs her Packard into her neighbour's prized garden. Her frustrated son (Dan Aykroyd) insists she allow him to hire a driver, played by Morgan Freeman. So begins a friendship that blossoms over the next 25 years until her mid 90s.
Eben Adams (Joseph Cotten) is a struggling and mostly failing New York artist until one day, in Central Park, he meets Jennie (Jennifer Jones). Jennie seems to possess an almost mystical quality and as Eben sketches her, his work shows more expression and emotion than anything he has ever done before. But before he knows it, Jennie has disappeared. Eben frantically searches for his mysterious model and when they meet again a few weeks later, Jennie seems to have aged several years. What then unfolds is one of the most unusual and unforgettable love stories ever told as they are both swept up in a strange love that even time cannot contain.
The hero of Julien Vuvivier's film is an expensive dress coat, which affects the fortunes and misfortunes of all who wear it. In these five sumptuous vignettes set for the most part in New York, the black formal coat is the only linking device. We first come across the coat in short noir about a matinee idol (Charles Boyer) embroiled in a love triangle with a callous woman (Rita Hayworth) and her sadistic husband. Time second is a comical tale starring Ginger Rogers, Cesar Romero and Henry Fonda about a love cheat and his best friend. The third is a tearjerker with Charles Laughton as an amateur musician yearning to play in an orchestra. Edward G. Robinson stars in the fourth as a down-and-out lawyer who reluctantly attends his college reunion. Paul Robeson stars in the final fable, which concludes the coat's journey.
Based on the story by Graham Greene, 'Went the Day Well?' is a classic piece of propagandist entertainment, a warning to British citizens to remain ever alert for the arrival of the enemy. A rare foray into darker material by Ealing Studios, Alberto Cavalcanti's film tells the story of a quiet English village which has been infiltrated by German soldiers masquerading as British troops, leaving the plucky villagers to uncover the plot and fight back.
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