The story of a French actress and a Japanese man's brief affair in Hiroshima, stirring up painful memories for them both, for her wartime 'collaboration' and, for him, the bomb which quite literally destroyed everything he had known. Resnais's film is now seen as revolutionary for its time an a must for film study courses. Sadly haunting.
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LE PETIT SOLDAT (1963)
Certification15 Our Rating
Godard does 'serious' with his attempt to make some sense of the Algerian Situation in the late 50s and France's role in it's future, following events through the proverbial 'little soldier', Bruno, a young Frenchman living in Geneva, who belongs to a right-wing terrorist group, and meets and falls in love with a young woman who belongs to a left-wing terrorist group. Complications ensue when the man is suspected by the members of his terrorist group of being a double agent.
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LOVE (1971)
CertificationU Our Rating
Two womens' lives have become rituals around an absent man, one is the man's bedridden mother, who believes her imprisoned son is hitting the big time in America, and the other his wife, carefully sustaining the illusion in the old lady.
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THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS (1966)
Certification15 Our Rating
A highly acclaimed and influential account of Algeria's turbulent past made in psuedo-documentary style. The tense plot surrounds the rise of nationalist organisations in '54 and the French government's attempts to quell them. This film was the prototype for most political thrillers of the 1970s.
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THE END OF SUMMER (1961)
CertificationU Our Rating
Manbei is the owner of a sake business that has been in his family for generations, but in the harsh economy of a post-war Japan his livelihood is under increasing pressure, a concern that is compounded by the delicate state of his family life and is own ageing but active libido. The End Of Summer was Yasujiro Ozu's penultimate film and is a delicately nuanced observation of a fading culture and its traditions. Warm, witty, impassioned and beautifully rendered.
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WHEN A WOMAN ASCENDS THE STAIRS (1960)
CertificationPG Our Rating
When a Woman Ascends the Stairs might be Japanese filmmaker Mikio Naruse's finest hour, a delicate, devastating study of a woman, Keiko, played heartbreakingly by Hideko Takamine, who works as a bar hostess in Tokyo's very modern post-war Ginza district. Sly, resourceful, but trapped, Keiko comes to embody the conflicts and struggles of a woman trying to establish her independence in a male-dominated society. A profoundly moving masterpiece.
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