A vast industrial landscape, two towering smoke stacks, a rundown factory building, and a coal-covered ground as far as the eye can see. Somewhere in the distance a small white dot slowly movings over the black and grey landscape. This tiny dot is our main character, Wanda (Barbara Loden), attempting to find her way through the barren wasteland that has become her life. Wanda is a meditative American Road Movie about a poor housewife who begins to feel lost and empty with the state of her life. After being accused by her husband of abandoning him and their children at a divorce hearing, Wanda aimlessly begins to drift from her home and take to the road. Unsure of her purpose and direction, Wanda finds herself clinging to another lost soul she meets on her journey, the short tempered small-time crook Norman (Michael Higgins). Wanda and Norman drift through highways and towns, committing petty crimes and robberies that eventually lead to tragic ends.





What defines the feminine experience? What does it mean to live, breathe, and die as a woman? Agnes Varda questions mortality through the eyes of a beautiful young woman on the edge of success in 1960's Paris. Cleo has been to the doctor and is waiting for the diagnosis, though she's convinced it's cancer. We follow her in real time for two hours and stand as witness to the fullness and frivolousness of a life coming to terms with itself.
If Albert Camus had made a film noir, it would have been very much like Allen Baron’s little-seen 1961 feature Blast of Silence. This low-budget jewel, which enjoyed a critical renaissance after a 1990 screening at the Munich Film Festival, is less a thriller than it is an existential exploration. In many ways, it anticipated Martin Scorsese’s equally dark New York drama Taxi Driver by a decade.
Family films are precious commodities. Slapstick plus smart humor have been winning combinations for many years now while the sentimental tearjerkers have taken a back seat. Lately, however there have been a few jewels emerging that are not only appropriate for young audiences but will entrance their parents as well. August Rush is a lovely music filled Orphan Annie/Oliver tale with sincere performances, intelligent, economical writing, a wonderful score and charming cinematography.
There has never been a more perfect film than Merchant Ivory's lush and lavish, A Room with a View. Visually it offers more than a simple view; instead there is a grandiose explosion of natural and cultural beauty traveling from the historical vistas of Florence to the opulence of the English countryside. Adapted with wit and wisdom from E.M. Forster's novel of the same name, A Room with a View explores the mingling of Britain's emerging middle class with the slowly dying aristocracy during the picturesque Edwardian Age. Similar in theme, adaptation and age to the tragically redeeming Howard's End, View tenders a gentler more fairy tale touch.