Down And Out

Tom and Jerry: The Gene Deitch Collection is a collection of animated short cartoons starring Tom and Jerry, all directed by Gene Deitch and released in 1961-62. All 13 cartoons restored & remastered, along with two documentaries.

Ingmar Bergman presents the battle of the sexes as a ramshackle, grotesque carnival in Sawdust and Tinsel, one of the late master’s most vivid early works. The story of the charged relationship between a turn-of-the-century traveling circus owner (Ake Grönberg) and his performer girlfriend (Harriet Andersson), the film features dreamlike detours and twisted psychosexual power plays that presage the director’s Smiles of a Summer Night and The Seventh Seal, works that would soon change the landscape of art cinema forever.

The Bride, a former professional assassin and pregnant, is shot and left for dead at her wedding, by none other than her former boss Bill. She wakes up from a coma after five years, without her baby, and sets out for revenge. After regaining strength and aquiring deadly weapons, she tracks down Bill's accomplices, at the same time her follow colleagues, and kills them one after another. Among them are O-Ren, who in the mean time became the head of the Yakuza, Vernita Green, who is now a housewife, and Budd, Bill's brother, who lives a shitty life in a trailer home. Not until the very end, does she get to face her nemesis, to take revenge for all that he has done to her, only to find out about a surprising truth. But she will Kill Bill.

Down a foggy, desolate road to the port city of Le Havre travels Jean (Jean Gabin), an army deserter looking for another chance to make good on life. Fate, however, has a different plan for him, as acts of both revenge and kindness render him front-page news. Also starring the blue-eyed phenomenon Michele Morgan in her first major role, and the menacing Michel Simon, Port of Shadows (Le Quai des brumes) starkly portrays an underworld of lonely souls wrestling with their own destinies. Based on the novel by Pierre Mac Orlan, the inimitable team of director Marcel Carne and writer Jacques Prevert deliver a quintessential example of poetic realism and a classic film from the golden age of French cinema.

Based upon a real-life story that happened in the early seventies in which the Chase Manhattan Bank in Gravesend, Brooklyn, was held siege by a gay bank robber determined to steal enough money for his male lover to undergo a sex change operation. On a hot summer afternoon, the First Savings Bank of Brooklyn is held up by Sonny and Sal, two down-and-out characters. Although the bank manager and female tellers agree not to interfere with the robbery, Sonny finds that there's actually nothing much to steal, as most of the cash has been picked up for the day….

This is just another roadside cafeteria. Gino, who enters it discreetly, is an armed robber … without an arm! He tries to hold up the place but fails pitifully: the pretty waitress won't allow! Two amateur kidnappers take a rich teenage girl hostage and want to exchange her for ransom. But their victim is not easy to deal with. Two singers meet in the cafeteria by chance and talk about a stolen song and a stolen woman. Five seventy-year-old retired robbers also meet at the cafeteria - where their hideout used to be - and work out a last caper. In the end, after having tried to steal from each other, go away together.

Takashi Miike is an extraordinary filmmaker, even if he works sometimes in circumstances that other directors might find ordinary, such as all of the genres that Miike tackles… which are, by a mild estimation, almost all of them. Name a kind of movie, Miike's probably done it, from family movie to samurai epic to just totally f***ed up way-past X-rated stuff, not to mention all of the Yakuza crime movies that by this time should be coming out of his nose from going over so often. But with Crows: Episode Zero, he found a way to tell a Yakuza story just a little different, by making it about the teenage kids (some of them, anyway) of the Yakuza who enroll in an "extreme" high school where it's basically not about learning anything but fighting and ascending the ranks to become the head of the school's bad-ass fightin' kids. It's the kind of movie that, if you are fourteen and watching it, it's like a near wet-dream of awesomeness. For the rest of us, the movie serves as lots of good fun.