The Moving Form of Film

Country orphan Lily goes to Berlin to stay with her tippling aunt, and soon meets Richard, handsome sculptor across the street. Persuaded half-reluctantly to pose for Richard, her physical charms (shown as fully as 1933 mores permitted) soon melt away his 'strictly business' attitude, and they become lovers. But Richard, wanting his freedom, connives at her marriage to his wealthy client Baron von Merzbach… whose household includes a jealous former mistress and a susceptible farm manager. Has Richard still a role to play in her life?

In 1962, filmgoers heard one of cinema's most striking musical openers of all time: solo French horn, without introduction, intoning opening notes of what becomes Academy Award-winning title song to legendary Blake Edwards look at unrelentingly grim descent of young couple into alcoholism.

Momentum, drama, love and dance, music, mysticism, tradition, magic and dizzying images in the forests and mountains of Slovakia, a country in the very heart of Europe. Dancing on Broken Glass is a series of frescos about basic human needs and feelings.The narrative of the film is simple - love and the struggle to experience love. The story has few words, lots of authentic music, captivating mountains and irresistible dance sequences. And these are as dynamic, cruel and genuine as the lives of the main characters. The film's images transport the viewer back to the roots of proto-Christian Europe and universal emotions.

Without doubt, the recordings of Tangerine Dream have made the greatest impact on the widest variety of instrumental music during the 1980s and '90s, ranging from the most atmospheric new age and space music to the harshest abrasions of electronic dance. Founded in 1967 by Edgar Froese in Berlin, the group has progressed through a full three dozen lineups (Froese being the only continuous member with staying power) and four distinct stages of development: the experimentalist minimalism of the late '60s and early '70s; stark sequencer trance during the mid- to late '70s, the group's most influential period; an organic form of instrumental music on their frequent film and studio work during the 1980s; and, finally, a more propulsive dance style, which showed Tangerine Dream with a sound quite similar to their electronic inheritors in the field of dance music.

Young traveller Allan Grey arrives in a remote castle and starts seeing weird, inexplicable sights (a man whose shadow has a life of its own, a mysterious scythe-bearing figure tolling a bell, a terrifying dream of his own burial). Things come to a head when one of the daughters of the lord of the castle succumbs to anaemia - or is it something more sinister?

Director: Jindřich Polák
Cast: Zdenek Stepánek, Radovan Lukavský, Dana Medrická, Miroslav Machácek

In many ways the missing link between Forbidden Planet and 2001: A Space Odyssey (and Star Trek), Icarus XB-1 is a fascinating sci-fi curio. For decades this was only available to English-speaking viewers in the form of Voyage to the End of the Universe, one of American International Pictures’ notorious hatchet jobs, heavily cut, dubbed (and partially retranslated) into English and with a nonsensical new ending that junks one of the film’s main themes in favour of a crass Planet of the Apes-style shock twist. (The fact that it predated that film by four or five years is the only mitigating factor, but that won’t cut much ice with today’s audiences).

''KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN'' begins with a theatrical-sounding homosexual describing the plot of an old movie (''her petite ankle slips into the perfumed water'') for the benefit of his prison cellmate, a political radical. There is nothing in this seemingly frivolous, beautifully staged opening to betray the film's tremendous reserves of seriousness and passion. Nor are there sufficient clues in the previous film careers of the director, Hector Babenco (the highly praised ''Pixote''), or the two stars, William Hurt and Raul Julia, to anticipate the stature of the work they do here. ''Kiss of the Spider Woman'' is a brilliant achievement for all of them, staged with the perfect control and fierce originality that make it one of the best films in a long while.