Volker Schlöndorff transposes Bertolt Brecht’s late-expressionist work to latter-day 1969. Poet and anarchist Baal lives in an attic and reads his poems to cab drivers. At first feted and later rejected by bourgeois society, Baal roams through forests and along motorways, greedy for schnapps, cigarettes, women and men: ‘You have to let out the beast, let him out into the sunlight.’ After impregnating a young actress he soon comes to regard her as a millstone round his neck. He stabs a friend to death and dies alone. ‘You are useless, mangy and wild, you beast, you crawl through the lowest boughs of the tree.’
The film takes youthful impetuousness and hatred of oppression as its subject and also ponders the cult of genius and sexual morals. Rainer Werner Fassbinder simultaneously plays both Baal and himself and is surrounded by many actors who were later to perform in his own films. After the film was broadcast on West German television, Brecht’s widow Helene Weigel prohibited any further screenings, arguing that the social circumstances engendering Baal’s rebelliousness had not been adequately explained.
After the tremendous popular success of the
Fant?mas novels, both of the major French
film studios — Pathé and Gaumont —
vied for the rights to produce films based
on the series. Gaumont won, and from
April 1913 to May 1914 Louis Feuillade
directed five Fant?mas films which critic
David Thomson has described as "the first
great movie experience."
Three manic idiots; a lawyer, cab driver and a handyman team up to run a ballet company to fulfill the will of a millionaire. Stooge-like antics result as the trio try to outwit the rich widow and her scheming big-shot lawyer, who also wants to run the ballet
When the sheltered and unsocialized Oliver is tasked with making new friends after the sudden and devastating death of his mother, he decides that digging a few up (literally) might be his best bet.
Genuine but increasingly insecure Pete is cautiously excited about reuniting with his college crew for a birthday weekend of memories, partying and earnest reconnection at a picturesque English manor.