Notes on Movies

Rick Dalton has long been viewed as a great and bankable television star, thanks to his lead role in a popular western series, playing a self-confident and ruthless bounty hunter. But now his career is floundering and he realizes his success could be something of the past. Nevertheless…

A young American, Kansas, who has settled down in a village in a lush corner of Peru gets hired as a horse wrangler in a movie set built nearby for a low-cost western production. The experience leaves him dissatisfied and instead of dreaming about filmmaking, he resumes a life that seems…

This is nighttime and the weather is rainy. A distant figure is shot stepping stealthily, hurriedly, into a movie theater. And so begins a strange journey.
Entering a movie theater means anyway exploring a new world, designed by a crew, enlivened…

Cinema is a gift of life, given out of love.
It was not eagerly sought after: the first scene shows a boy stridently reluctant to go to the movies, with his parents trying their best to convince him he should give it a try. Subtly, their…

A man, name: Wolfgang won Waltershausen, flirts with a woman, name: Annie Schreyer, and invites her at a café; they get along and after he walks her back to her home she accepts to give spend the next day with him. Later on that Saturday afternoon, a taxi driver, name: Erwin Splettstößer…

The film was shot soon after Robert Wiene shot “Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari – The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” but there has been no trace of any public release of that other egregious example of Expressionism in Germany and for a long time copies were hard to get. That is…

As she lies dying a young Salvation Army worker asks to meet a man she tried to help. Two of her colleagues scour the city right away, but quite unenthusiastic: David Holm seems to have been a hell of a problem, even a nuisance – as she wakes her daughter, Edit’s mother has begged…

Bad dreams open the film, raising the stakes for a day that should be unlike many others in the sprawling, wealthy farming estate of the Broholm family: this is the last day the elder daughter of the parents, Lisa, is spending with her relatives, as she is supposed to leave…

Still images lie at the core of the moving picture – at least according to a title card shown at the beginning: it is the very existence of old photographs of the landscape and folks of the South-West of Iceland that prompted director Hylnur Pálmason to imagine what has been the…

This is not the first time a film examines the life and works of great 17th century Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn – think of Alexander Korda in 1936 (“Rembrandt”) or Jos Stelling in 1977 (“Rembrandt fecit 1669”). What sets right away director Peter Greenaway’s effort apart…