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The notorious pirate ruler Madame X places a print ad, calling on women to escape their boring lives and promising "gold, love and adventure" to all who come aboard her ship, the Orlando. A motley crew including a housewife, diva and artist (played by Yvonne Rainer) embark on a quest for self-transformation, which quickly heads towards destruction as they are subjected to Madame X's sadistic, erotic escapades.

When 'Vogler's Magnetic Health Theater' comes to town, there's bound to be a spectacle. Reading reports of a variety of supernatural disturbances at Vogler's prior performances abroad, the leading townspeople (including the police chief and medical examiner) request that their troupe provide them a sample of their act, before allowing them public audiences. The scientific-minded disbelievers try to expose them as charlatans, but Vogler and his crew prove too clever for them.

The spoiled young heir to the decaying Amberson fortune comes between his widowed mother and the man she has always loved.

On one random day in the San Fernando Valley, a dying father, a young wife, a male caretaker, a famous lost son, a police officer in love, a boy genius, an ex-boy genius, a game show host and an estranged daughter will each become part of a dazzling multiplicity of plots, but one story.

At a family reunion, the Cooper clan find that their parents' home is being foreclosed. "Temporarily," Ma moves in with son George's family, Pa with daughter Cora. But the parents are like sand in the gears of their middle-aged children's well regulated households. Can the old folks take matters into their own hands?

This utterly gorgeous Gothic melodrama would be widely hailed as a masterpiece, had it not been made in Italy during the Mussolini regime. A gross injustice, as Malombra - unlike Piccolo Mondo Antico, Mario Soldati's earlier film of an Antonio Fogazzaro novel - contains not one moment of triumphalist flag-waving or Fascist family values. Oddly akin to Rebecca in its atmosphere of death-haunted romance and voluptuous doom, it reaches a peak of visual refinement of which Hitchcock could only dream.
Its star is Isa Miranda (famous, and not without reason, as Italy's answer to Garbo and Dietrich) playing a headstrong but unstable young noblewoman, confined by her uncle to a gloomy villa on the shores of Lake Como. A yellowed and crumbling letter, found in an old spinet, convinces her that she is the reincarnation of her uncle's first wife - another troubled beauty who died a virtual prisoner after being caught in a forbidden love affair. When a handsome young writer (Andrea Checchi) comes to stay, Miranda decides that HE is the reincarnation of the dead woman's lover. Gradually, she lures him into her web of sex and revenge...
What more to say without spoiling the fun? Miranda gives a performance to rival any of the great divas of Hollywood. Only Davis and Stanwyck, perhaps, could play a bad girl so boldly without losing all sympathy. The evocation of 19th century aristocracy, in its full decadent splendour, is visually and dramatically flawless - a model for such later Italian gems as Visconti's Senso and The Innocent.
It helped, perhaps, that Soldati himself was a leading novelist. Blessed with an absolute respect for the classics he adapted, but in no way inhibited by them. He was also the guiding spirit of the now-forgotten 'calligraphic' movement, which brought the Italian cinema to such wondrous aesthetic heights during World War Two, only to collapse before the horror of Neo-Realism. Can we blame Soldati for giving up film-making in disgust and going back to writing novels?
So if you've ever felt (as I do) that Rossellini's much-touted Rome - Open City is the work of an amateur...well, Malombra is the film you have to see!

A private detective takes on a case that involves him with three eccentric criminals, a beautiful liar, and their quest for a priceless statuette.

After years spent working as a prostitute in her Italian village, middle-aged Mamma Roma has saved enough money to buy herself a fruit stand so that she can have a respectable middle-class life and reestablish contact with the 16-year-old son she abandoned when he was an infant. But her former pimp threatens to expose her sordid past, and her troubled son seems destined to fall into a life of crime and violence.

1956 French film by Robert Bresson

A Man Vanishes examines the concept of Johatsu, tackling the phenomenon of people missing in Japan over the years. It picks one such person from the list, someone who had seemed to disappear from the face of the earth due to embezzlement from his company, and the filmmakers begin an investigative documentary into the reasons behind and attempt at tracking him down.

The story of one shepherd's single-handed quest to re-forest a desolate valley in the foothills of the French Alps throughout the first half of the 20th century.

Bill takes Trina into his depression camp cabin. Later, just as he finds showgirl LaRue who will support him, Trina becomes pregnant.

A money order from a relative in Paris throws the life of a Senegalese family man out of order. He deals with corruption, greed, problematic family members, the locals and the changing from his traditional way of living to a more modern one.

1979 film by Woody Allen

An unhappily married couple moves to Vienna, where the wife’s married best friend lives, and soon, sparks fly between the wife and the best friend’s husband.

Mikolás and his brother Adam end up with a young German hostage of noble blood during a robbery. While their clan prepares for the wrath of the German king, Mikolás is sent to pressure his neighbor Lazar into a defense pact. Persuasion fails and he abducts Lazar's daughter Marketa on the eve of her initiation as a nun in an act of vengeance.

2019 film directed by Pietro Marcello

1946 film by Emeric Pressburger, Michael Powell

Famed actress Susan Taslimi plays three roles here: Kian, who doubts her identity; Vida, the twin sister, a self-assured artist; and their mother, who gives up one child out of fear of poverty, then deprives the other of affection due to deep regrets regarding the child whom she has abandoned.

1935 film directed by Willi Forst