This sweetly stirring and eloquent film from Burkina Faso's Idrissa Ouedraogo is the story of a 12-year-old boy who bravely befriends an old woman, even though she's been shunned by her village for being a witch. The boy's affection for her leads to his calling her “yaaba” (grandmother), but soon the social pressures of his daily life and his respon…
leri, Oggi e Domani She Got What She Asked For Of the many multiple-story films that came out of Italy in the 1960s, Vittorio De Sica's Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow was both the best and the most popular. In “Adelina,” Sophia Loren makes a shady living on the black market in Naples. When she makes the happy discovery that Italian law prohibits pregnant women from being jailed…
Akira Kurosawa's breathtaking, cynical, hilarious Yojimbo is the story of a lone samurai (Toshiro Mifune) who wanders into a new town controlled by two warring clans. Equally disdainful of both, the samurai sells his services as a yojimbo (bodyguard) to both sides, profiting handily while scheming to arrange their mutual destruction. Yojimbo has a loose, casual f…
The Way Five Turkish political prisoners are released from their minimum-security prison for one week, to visit their families. Before long, they almost come to wish they had stayed in jail. Disasters of every stripe flood into the lives of these men, and most—like the man who finds that his wife was locked out of their house by his family because she had an affair while he was in jail …
In The Young Poisoner's Handbook, Hugh O'Conor plays Graham, a young misfit whose chemistry set provides him endless hours of consolation and companionship. After a bit of experimenting, he begins poisoning his stepmum and tracking her progress toward death in a series of charts and journals. Graham is a true sociopath; his worries and anxieties all center around being caught, and he…