Además del guionista y director Richard Brooks, otros dos colaboradores de A sangre fría recibieron nominaciones al Oscar. Uno de ellos fue el compositor Quincy Jones, cuya astuta e inquietante partitura jazzera recuerda a la que Duke Ellington hizo para Anatomía de un asesinato. Pero lo más grandioso de A sangre fr&iacu...
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Nearly 47 years ago, Garrel made a six-minute short film during the peak of the May 1968 events in France, composed of his own 35mm takes and 16mm footage taken by the film students who participated in the revolts. One single screening of Actua 1 took place in late May before Garrel declared the film was officially lost. Last year, the negatives mi...
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Harvey Logan and his two children live in the windy desolation of Tierra del Fuego, by the ocean. It’s not exactly an idyllic trio: Logan is violent; Eva is a restless and sensual teenager who dreams about going to Paris; his pathologically introverted brother Juan is in love with her. A British businessman and an Argentine engineer who want...
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Amalia was the first Argentine novel. Written in 1851 by José Mármol during his exile in Montevideo, it was published in chapters on the newspaper La Semana, and stood as a big statement against Rosas, who was then governor of Buenos Aires. In 1914, successful playwright Enrique García Velloso decided to adapt the play into cin...
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When Alejandro Agresti made The Act in Question, he had already directed several films –some in Argentina, some in the Netherlands– and his filmography surpassed in quality and extension the ones of his contemporaries (and not just the local ones). But nothing could have foreseen the imaginary biography of magician Quiroga (played by an...
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The Hunger is a film both assured and ambitious, wringing subtlety and slow-boiling tension out of a shamelessly ridiculous plot involving a vampiric vixen that has persisted since Ancient Egyptian times in the graceful form of Catherine Deneuve, with lover David Bowie riding her coattails through the centuries. It’s also a vampire film that...
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“Watching Sergei Parajanov’s The Color of Pomegranates, or Sayat Nova, is like opening a door and walking into another dimension, where time has stopped and beauty has been unleashed. On a very basic level, it’s a biography of the Armenian poet Sayat Nova, but before all else it’s a cinematic experience, and you come away re...
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TV meteorologist Phil Connors travels to Punxsutawney for a festivity, Groundhog Day (2/2), a traditional celebration in the US and Canada in which this animal acts as meteorologist, because according to folklore, it is able to determine if the winter to come will be soft or harsh. That day comes to an end, and Phil Connors goes to sleep; the next...
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This is the fun story of how Tom Ewell tries to resist the temptation of Marilyn Monroe, and struggles with himself. It is set on very unfavorable conditions for the male lead, even if he tries to appear very decent and married. He’s alone in his New York apartment after sending off his wife and son on vacations. It’s hotter than hell....
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It’s been called everything from an outright disaster to ‘the weirdest great movie ever made’. Like The Magnificent Ambersons before it, Welles’ glittering thriller was subject to swingeing studio cuts (up to an hour was sliced from the finished picture). But what remains of The Lady from Shanghai is remarkable enough. Made...
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People always ask us why we chose to inaugurate our film restoration studio with The Truce. We could answer that it was simply because of the technical challenge, or because we wanted to pay a well-deserved tribute to Sergio Renán, a fundamental artist. Or because of the great performance of Alterio and an incomparable cast. Or because we wa...
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The keynote address in what has become –rising out of the neurotic bath of 1970s exploitation films– one of the world’s cinema most original and discomfiting visions, this masterwork from Cronenberg has aged into a kind of subterranean sacredness. Name another film that takes as many risks, runs its astonishing course with such a...
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A film about people who chase cars in order to hunk their horn. Or about the eternal tension that exists between industrial bourgeoisie and the workers. Passion is an absolute simultaneity, the destruction of a fragmented world; it’s the world exploding in images and sounds as evidence of a fragmented world. It’s a realist film, the way...
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In some alley in San Francisco’s Chinatown, Jack Burton’s truck is parked. And the verbose, smart-ass, mainly insufferable Burton is determined to get it back, whatever the cost; or, rather, whatever it costs his (not quite) friend and expert martial artist Wang. While he’s at it, he will make sure Wang pays his gambling debts and...
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The last real earthquake to hit cinema was Blue Velvet. There is much of what noir does best in here: Kyle MacLachlan’s Jeffrey Beaumont slips past the safety rails and hops right into a raging maelstrom of guilt and evil as blithely as any noir protagonist ever did; and Dennis Hopper’s Frank Booth is just the necessary incarnation of n...
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Like his earlier The Sorrow and the Pity, which examined the behavior of the French during the Nazi occupation, Marcel Ophuls’ The Memory of Justice expands the possibilities of the documentary motion picture in such a way that all future films of this sort will be compared to it. It is monumental, though not only because it goes on for four...
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