monsieurk's - Favourites List

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Named after the apocryphal exclamation of Soviet security chief Lavrentiy Beria as he rushed to Stalin's deathbed, this blackly funny, deliriously immersive satire distils the anticipation and anxiety in the Moscow air as the Soviet despot lay dying. Late winter 1953.

The lives of nearly half the planet are in Stalin's hands. A military surgeon, General Yuri Georgievich Klensky (Yuri Tsurilo), finds himself a target of the Doctors' Plot: the anti-Semitic conspiracy accusing Jewish doctors in Moscow of planning to assassinate the Soviet elite. Pursued, abused, and marked for the gulags, Yuri is chased and dragged through a Stalinist Soviet nightmare. His desperate, jolting journey encapsulates the madness of the era.

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'Aparajito' sees Apu (Smaran Ghosal / Pinaki Sengupta) move with his family to the busy city of Benares, where they hope to build a new life after suffering a devastating family tragedy.

But when Apu's father then dies, the young man decides to head out on his own and attend college in Calcutta, leading to a growing estrangement between himself and his widowed mother.

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Opening with a shot of an x-ray, showing the main character's stomach, 'Ikiru' tells the tale of a dedicated, downtrodden civil servant who, diagnosed with a fatal cancer, learns to change his dull, unfulfilled existence, and suddenly discovers a zest for life.

Plunging first into self-pity, then a bout of hedonistic pleasure-seeking on the frenetic streets of post-war Tokyo, Watanable (Takashi Shimura) - the film's hero - finally finds satisfaction through building a children's playground.

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Based on the Ed McBain novel, High and Low is a gripping police thriller starring Toshiro Mifune.

Wealthy industrialist Kingo Gondo (Mifune) faces an agonising choice when a ruthless kidnapper, aiming to snatch his young son, takes the chauffeur's boy by mistake - but still demands the ransom, leaving Gondo facing ruin if he pays up. An anatomy of the inequalities in modern Japanese society, High and Low is a complex film noir, where the intense police hunt for the kidnapper is accompanied by penetrating insight into the kidnappers state of mind. Kurosawa's virtuoso direction provides no easy answers, and in short, intense sequences, he portrays the businessman, the police and the criminal as equally brutal but nonetheless human.

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Uncle Boonmee has chosen to spend his final days surrounded by his loved ones in the remote forest, an important place from his childhood and, he believes, the possible location of his former existences.

Surprisingly, the ghost of his deceased wife appears to care for him, and the spirit of his long lost son returns. Contemplating the reasons for his illness, Boonmee treks through the jungle with his family to a mysterious hilltop cave - the birthplace of his first life.

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Taking its cue from Nietzsche's famous encounter with a mistreated horse on Via Carlo Alberto, The Turin Horse depicts the aftermath of this seemingly innocuous but destructively profound confrontation.

Following a man and his daughter in their daily routine, a bizarre series of disturbing events slowly begin to strip life of its very essence resulting in a terrifying, all-consuming finale...

Jean Renoir's intoxicating first colour feature - shot entirely on location in India - is a lyrical adaptation of Rumer Godden's autobiographical coming-of-age tale of an adolescent girl living with her English family on the banks of West Bengal during the waning years of British colonial life.

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Mr. Lazarescu is a 63 year old man who shares his apartment with his three cats. Suffering from pains in his head and stomach he calls an ambulance and whilst he waits, asks his neighbours for some pills.

Though they disapprove of his heavy drinking and the state of his home, they try their best to help. Hindered by a major bus accident the medics eventually arrive and so begins a long and increasingly frustrating night. Shuffled from pillar to post he becomes wearier and weaker in the face of the medical professions bureaucracy and casual inefficiency. A succession of colourful characters permeates the film and the combination of dry humour and 'scalpel sharp' satire make this one of the year's most deeply affecting films.

In 1959, Kit (Martin Sheen) who has killed several people, and his new girlfriend Holly (Sissy Spacek), who watched him do it, are adrift in a double fantasy of crime and punishment across South Dakota and Montana. They're playing make-believe but the bullets and bloodshed are very real...

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A couple floats over a war-town Cologne; on the way to a birthday party, a father stops to tie his daughter's shoelaces in the pouring rain; teenage girls dance outside a cafe, 'About Endlessness' is a beautiful work which Andersson presents as his final film, a kaleidoscope of all that is

eternally human, an infinite story of the vulnerability of existence.

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'Sanjuro' was a film made in response to popular demand.

The previous year Kurosawa had scored a huge critical and commercial hit for his own production company with Yojimbo, which introduced the character calling himself 'Sanjuro' (which means simply 'thirty years old'), the scruffy, mercenary, cynical ronin (masterless samurai) played by Toshiro Mifune. The public had taken this maverick figure to their hearts and demanded a sequel. Originally Kurosawa had planned to give the script to another director, Hiromichi Horikawa, but finally decided to take it on himself.

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Red Beard, the last and most ambitious of Kurosawa's collaborations with Toshiro Mifune, marks the end of one of the most remarkable actor-director relationships in the history of cinema. Toshiro Mifune plays a commanding but humane doctor in a rural clinic in late 19th-century Japan.

An idle and socially ambitious intern (Yuzo Kayama) arrives at the clinic and discovers the meaning of responsibility, first to oneself and then to others. This intimate epic - and offbeat social drama - boldly mixes the styles of soap opera and the action movie, and rewards the viewer with a detailed reconstruction of a feudal era, a warmly humanitarian message and a powerhouse performance by Mifune.

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In a career-defining performance, Alain Delon plays Jef Costello, a contract killer with samurai instincts.

After carrying out a flawlessly planned hit, Jef finds himself caught between a persistent police investigator and a ruthless employer, and not even his armor of fedora and trench coat can protect him. An elegantly stylized masterpiece of cool by maverick director Jean-Pierre Melville, 'Le Samourai' is a razor-sharp cocktail of 1940's American gangster cinema and 1960's French pop culture - with a liberal dose of Japanese lone-warrior mythology.

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The film that propelled Rohmer to international acclaim remains one of the finest achievements of his career.

The fourth in the 'Moral Tales' series, it tells the story of a chaste and conservative thirty-something (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who sees a woman that he believes will be his perfect match whilst attending church. But when he unwittingly spends the night at the apartment of the worldly and spirited divorcee Maud (Francoise Fabian), he finds the moral certainties of his life are suddenly thrown into question.

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The film focuses on Okin, the ex-geisha who has embraced the new post-war economy most successfully and single-mindedly. Former colleagues Tamae, whose son threatens to become a gigolo, and Tomi, who has a decidedly 'modem' daughter, live together and try to make ends meet.

With his customary emphasis on the material circumstances that shape our lives, Naruse nevertheless manages to transform the film into a moving celebration of friendship.