Dying

Canadian director Allan King is one of cinema’s best-kept secrets. Over the course of fifty years, he shuttled between features and shorts, big-screen cinema and episodic television, comedy and drama, fiction and nonfiction. It was with his cinema-verite-style documentaries, though—his “actuality dramas,” as he called them—that King left his greatest mark on film history. These startlingly intimate studies of people whose lives are in flux—damaged children, warring spouses, the terminally ill— always done without narration or interviews, are riveting and at times emotionally overwhelming. Humane, cathartic, and important, Allan King’s spontaneous portraits of the everyday demand to be seen.

The award-winning director Andrei Tarkovsky the son of a famous Russian poet, was born in 1935 and grew up in and around Moscow during the Second World War. This non-linear autobiographical film is considered by many Russian-speakers to be his best film and is his most personal meditation on time, history and the Russian countryside. In a series of episodes and images, he captures the mood and feeling of the period just before, during and after the war. Lyrical reminiscences of his mother and of his father's poetry figure large in the film, along with extraordinary images of nature. Combining black-and-white and color work, with some unusual documentary footage, this highly regarded movie is structured with the logic of a dream.

David Sternberg (Ron Silver) and his father Eli (Jerry Lewis) ran a clothing business, and were being squeezed by the fearsome gangster Rick Pinzolo (Stanley Tucci). David goes to the OCB for help, thus Vinnie is recruited to act as security for the Sternbergs. After a small-time loanshark attacked and injured Vinnie, he was temporarily replaced by retired agent John Henry Raglin (Anthony Denison). (Note: in reality, star Ken Wahl had broken his ankle in an on-set accident, and was written out while he recovered.) Raglin brought down (and killed) Pinzolo, but not in time to save Eli's business or David's life. Joan Chen appeared in one episode of this arc, as a rebellious Chinese sweatshop worker with whom the married Raglin briefly has an affair.

As a weary sailor named Jan (Matthieu Carrière) sets foot on dry land, he is mysteriously abducted and awakens in the isolated mansion of Malpertuis. There, he is reunited with his sister Nancy (Susan Hampshire) and an eclectic group of distant relatives, each summoned by his dying uncle Quentin Cassavius (Orson Welles). Cassavius wishes to will all of his heirs an equal portion of his fortune. However, in return, each must honor his dying request: They are to remain within Malpertuis for the rest of their lives, the last couple to marry.