Category: Film
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“Stoszek”, directed by Werner Herzog
Movie, 1977 Tale of a struggling German street musician, fresh out of prison, and who’s chased out of his home country by a couple of thugs and takes up with a couple of friends in the USA. A story with a touch of Candide about it, in which the well-meaning, essentially good, and entrepreneurial hero…
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“BlacKkKlansman”, directed by Spike Lee
Movie, 2018 A darkly and predominantly comic account if the infiltration of the Ku Klux Klan through the efforts of an afro-touting, colour-barrier breaking policeman. While there are a few moments of heightened time at the beginning of the film, during a dramatised portrayal of a Kwame Ture speech which raises and almost deifies the…
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“Crooks Anonymous”, directed by Ken Annakin
Movie, 1962 Early 1960s comedy, starring a slightly undercharged Leslie Phillips, trying to go straight and win over his fiance, with the help of a reforming, crusading agency, Crooks Anonymous. A gentle romp which looks and to some extent holds up power and social structures for review, while showing how individuals struggle against them. The…
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“Prince Avalanche”, directed by David Gordon Green
Movie, 2013 Buddy movie set in Texas, in which a couple of road repairers help each other through a few trials and tribulations of their interconnected lives. A film with echoes of Beckett and Magnus Mills, which drifts along but holds the viewers’ attention. One of those independent productions when everything that happens does so…
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“The Spy Who Came in From the Cold”, directed by Martin Ritt
Movie, 1965 Bleak, eerie and nihilistic existences in the Cold War, partly set in London, Berlin and other locations in Germany. A poetic despondency hangs over this film depicting the lives of an aging operative and a young Communist idealist, who both seem to exist and to not exist, and are both played in a…
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“The Turning Point,” directed by William Dieterle
Movie, 1952 Crime drama, in which a newly appointed American police head is given a rough time and some uncomfortable home truths as he tries to sort out a local crime ring. This is a film which clips along reasonably well, except for an overlong courtroom scene. If the film’s not startlingly original, the trials…