A legendary early masterpiece of French cinema 'Les Vampires' follows the exploits of a nefarious band of master criminals led by the seductive femme fatale Irma Vep alluringly played by Musidora. Holding Paris in the grip of terror the underworld gang are pursued across the city by heroic journalist Philippe Guerande and his sidekick Mazamette. Reflecting the mood of fear and anxiety in World War I era France this meticulously restored ten-part silent serial from film pioneer Louis Feuillade - creator of the acclaimed Fant''mas serials - is a hugely influential and engrossing crime drama from cinema's golden age. Musical accompaniment composed by Eric Le Guen and Chateau Flight.
Marcus Crowe is a failed writer who struggles with reality. His girlfriend, Jill, is desperate for Marcus to pursue a proper career. Broke, the couple find a perfect room to rent owned by an old couple, Henry and Josephine Baker, who take a keen interest in the young couple's lives. They are shocked when told the old couple have a new born baby. Stuck in the house 24-7 Marcus spirals into paranoia and believes the old couple is spying on them. When he finds the horrifying truth behind the baby, the old couple's real reason for renting the room is revealed.
Way, way before he dreamt up his famous Dogme manifesto, Lars von Trier launched his feature-film career with The Element of Crime and proved that, 400 years after Hamlet, the Danes can still do melancholy like nobody else. Less a film noir than a film jaune sale, this ultra-enigmatic thriller is shot entirely in tones of grimy sepia in a world where nightfall seems to be an unceasing condition. A police detective, Fisher (Michael Elphick), is summoned from Cairo to "Europe" (the location never gets any more specific than that) to investigate a series of gory child-murders. He comes to suspect that the killer may be a mysterious character called Harry Grey and sets out to retrace Grey's movements. The film takes its title from a treatise written by Fisher's old mentor Osborne (Welsh actor Esmond Knight, a veteran of Powell and Pressburger's films), but it might as well refer to water. Von Trier conjures up a world not only permanently benighted, but dank, sodden and dripping both indoors and out, cluttered with mouldy, antiquated industrial machinery. There are echoes (or pre-echoes) here of half-a-dozen other movies--Blade Runner, City of Lost Children, Tarkovsky's Stalker, Welles' The Trial--and at times it feels as though von Trier has just set out to show he can do art house as well as anybody and possibly better. The plot makes no sense whatever and clearly isn't meant to, and Elphick's bemused expression, one suspects, derives from the actor as much as from the character he's playing. As always with von Trier you can't help wondering if whole thing isn't an elaborate put-on, especially since the director himself shows up, epicene and shaven-headed, playing a personage called "Schmuck of Ages". But what it lacks in coherence (either narrative or visual) Element of Crime makes up for in atmosphere, which it has, literally, by the bucketful. This release, incidentally, is the English-language version. --Philip Kemp
A drug lord's wife faces a crisis of loyalty when her husband's cutthroat dealings compel her to flee with their young children.
Lost in Transition is your passport to the soul of snowboarding. Take a journey as snowboarding's best athletes go from pipe walls to rails from the steepest top to bottom lines to the biggest backcountry booters...
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