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Federico Fellini's Oscar-nominated 8 1/2 is a masterpiece of storytelling and cinema. The most autobiographical of Fellini's films, the plot of which concerns a 43-year-old film director who is having a midlife crisis, it is a career benchmark for this magnificent Italian New Wave director. Beautifully choreographed with flashbacks, dream sequences, exaggerated fantasy scenes, and magical surrealist episodes, 8 1/2 is one of the richest, most exuberant movies ever made, in the mode of Fellini's artfully abstract LA DOLCE VITA and AMARCORD.Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni) is at a crisis point in his life and his work; in the opening sequence, Guido, suffocating, is caught in traffic with the windows of his car locked shut. He climbs out of the sunroof and literally rises up over the highway into the clouds, seemingly free, when he realizes there's a rope tied around his ankle that is violently pulling him back to earth. Cutting from this dream to the health spa where Guido is trying to recapture his creativity and write the screenplay for his next film, his vices become clear: Guido is self-absorbed, and he's distracted by the fabulous cast of actresses, intellectuals, and eccentrics who have joined him at the spa. Additionally he struggles with Freudian complexes about his wife (Anouk Aimee), his lover (Sandro Milo), his ideal woman (Claudia Cardinale), and his dead parents; and his repressive Catholic guilt follows him everywhere like a haunting mist.
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In EL DESVIO, four disadvantaged slack friends make a fateful decision to forego their usual urban club night for a quiet bonfire and night of drinking in the countryside. They could never imagine that they will discover a crashed, abandoned car that contains a fortune! Overwhelmed by their seeming good fortune, the friends take off with the money, dreaming of what they can do with it. However, what seems too good to be true often is, and their newfound wealth comes at a very high price.DVD Features:Region [unknown]Keep Case
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Ernesto (Ernesto Alterio) is apprenticed to well-seasoned con artists Manco (Manuel Alexandre) and Federico (Federico Luppi), when the trio decide to execute their coup de grace in this plot-twisted thriller. In order to pull off this large job, they enlist the help of Pilar (Victoria Abril), a classic femme fatale with whom Federico shares a past--and who is his only weakness.
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In the second installment of the DEAD OR ALIVE trilogy, Takashi Miike references the namesake film, but presents a very different film. While still loaded with indiscriminate violence and black comedy, DEAD OR ALIVE 2 becomes a bit more sentimental. Sho Aikawa and Riki Takeuchi return to play the main characters, but this time with a moral purpose. When Mizuki (Sho Aikawa), a Yakuza gangster, witnesses a target shot by a rival assassin, he tracks down the killer to check out the competition. What he finds, however, is that his rival, Shuichi (Riki Takeuchi), is also a long-lost childhood friend. They escape from the rival gangsters who want to kill them by returning to their childhood home, where they visit the orphanage where they lived, and find a renewed sense of what is right and wrong in their lives.DVD Features:Region [unknown]Keep CaseLetterboxed Widescreen - 1.85Additional Release Material: Original TrailerText/Photo Galleries: Trailer Gallery
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Do not allow the sorrow of grieving to interfere with the power of hatred and revenge. This message, delivered by a family matriarch (Marieta Severo), is clearly understood by the three sisters who are the title characters in THE THREE MARIAS. The sisters are called home when their father and two brothers are brutally murdered in separate slayings, all ordered by a man from their mother's past. The grieving widow and mother responds to the killings by commanding her daughters to act. She assigns each daughter a hitman in order to avenge the deaths. Various complications keep these mercenaries from carrying out their tasks and the sisters must take it upon themselves to finish the job, as each of the Marias targets one of the three killers.The eye-for-an-eye mentality of this Brazilian thriller is just one of many themes drawn from the Bible. Gothic imagery and quotes from the scriptures also harken back to biblical roots while the remote Brazilian locations add a grim, melodramatic quality to the film.DVD Features:Region (unknown)
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