Bandini (Imprisoned)

The film tells the story of a woman prisoner serving life imprisonment for murder, Kalyani ,the all suffering, selfless, sacrificing, and strong yet weak Indian woman. The film's protagonist Kalyani had the courage to not only make choices in her life but choices which at times might appear to be even wrong ones as she gives up everything for love. Her past is told in flashback.  During the British Raj, Kalyani (Nutan) falls in love with freedom fighter Bikash. (Ashok Kumar) .  He later leaves her in the village promising to come back but never does.  The society treats Kalyani harshly. She leaves the village and moves to the city.  Interestingly when Bikash tells Kalyani his story ,  Bimal Roy uses the flashbacks within flashback device in the film, surely one of the earliest use of such a technique in Indian Cinema.  While the events of the story are highly melodramatic ,  Bimalda takes great care to handle them with  sensitivity, simplicity and subtlety. Bandini is brilliantly photographed by Kamal Bose with its rich tonal quality and evocative framing.  The film also sees the debut of Gulzar  as a lyricist with Mora Gora Ang Laile , one of the most romantic songs in Indian Cinema as it expresses the heroine's first flush of love. Dharmendra is okish while Ashok Kumar is impressive as Bikash but Bandini clearly belongs to Nutan.  She portrays her characters inner conflict and complex emotions with almost near perfections.

Elippathayam ( The Rat Trap)

  The film documents the feudal -life in Kerala at its twilight.  The protagonist is trapped within himself  and is unable to comprehend the changes taking place around him.  Unni, the last male-heir of a decaying and feudal joint family gets trapped within himself.  His older sister Rajamma waits on him hand and foot ; Sridevi ,the younger , is studying at school and is drawn only reluctantly into his service.  The treatment is great ; using rats as his governing metaphor.  Unni (played brilliantly by Karamana Janardhan Nair ) is stubborn ,narcissistic , feudalistic and an escapist to the core.
According to Adoor , the film is a "a detailed study of a character at many levels -- psychological, physical, social, even genetic, based on his roots. I gave primary colors to the characters' clothes and a predominant gray to the background. "  The sister Rajamma is destroyed by the silence of her brother,  who does not support her when she wants to get married -he turns down an offer because he felt it was beneath his family.  The decline is vividly told , with colour and music used as a striking and significant constituent of the film's thematic development .

Solyaris ( Solaris)

Solaris is a 1972 science-fiction film adaptation of the novel Solaris, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky.  The film is a meditative psychological drama occurring mostly aboard a space station orbiting the fictional planet Solaris. This film weaves a story about a man named Kris Kelvin, played by a haunted Donatas Banionis, who is assigned to replace a scientist onboard a space station that is orbiting and monitoring the oceans of a strange and mysterious planet.  

After decades of study, the scientific mission at the space station has barely progressed. To make matters worse, most of the crew has succumbed to a series of emotional crisis.  The crew does not wish to discuss what's going on ,and only hints that Kelvin will find out himself.  Kelvin soon wakes up to find his dead wife Khari (Natalya Bondarchuk) sitting with him in his room. Some mysterious force coming from the planet below has tapped into his mind and made portions of his memories or dreams physical. Solaris , contrary to its setting, is interested in inner as opposed to outer space - namely, the realm of our consciousness.  

Tarkovsky manipulates the basic framework of the Sci-fi genre to express his own thematic concerns, refusing to bow to generic conventions. At it's core, Solaris is a philosophical treatise on the human condition , and it intelligently questions the certainty of reality. The age-old argument of science versus nature comes to a head, as these well-educated , knowledgeable men fail to provide answers. Questions arise over these fantastical events being manifested from the deep recesses of each man's unconscious will. When we love someone, who do we love?  That person, or our idea of that person?  When we touch them , it is not the touch we experience but our consciousness of the touch .

Yuke yuke nidome no shojo (Go,Go Second Time Virgin)

Wakamatsu's Go, Go Second Time Virgin tells the tale of two Japanese teens brought together by sexual violence., revenge and rebellion.  Poppo, a teenage girl is raped by four boys on the roof of a seven-story apartment building.   She asks them to kill her , but they mock her and leave.  Tsukio, a teenage boy has been watching the rape passively. The story revolves around both characters befriendment and subsequent attempts to deal with their traumatic past and present. 

Poppo had an incredibly dysfunctional past which includes the gang-rape of her mother leading to Poppo's conception, incest , the suicide of her father with his mistress, the subsequent suicide of her mother out of loneliness and two rapes.  She is nihilistic and consistently reiterates her desire to die.  In a colour flashback, Tsukio tells of his own recent sexual abuse at the hands his parents and another couple, all of whome he has stabbed to death. Poppo repeatedly asks Tsukio to kill her, but he refuses.  Tsukio initially looks on with some adolescent excitement,  his hatred for the abusers grow throughout the film until his rage explodes in final scenes. On the surface, the audience will be in for a great deal of sex ,violence and drug-induced bizarreness. Stylistically,  the entire film is shot in black and white and takes place within the confines of the apartment building, either on the roof, in the basement, or in the bloodied apartment of Tsukio's attackers. 

 It is a rather dismal tale of primitive morality in the face of degradation, humiliation and abuse. It would seem that this film's  message is one of the consequence of a moral decline within society and the irreparable damage it causes among innocent youth. This decline explicitly involves the pursuit of unfettered and often violent sexuality as well as drug and alcohol abuse .

Madeo (Mother)

Mother is a murder mystery, a melodrama, a black comedy, a keen social satire and much more.  Bong's work is layered with the skill of comedy and drama ,both often so dark and thick that you can put ur hand in and not feel the bottom.

              An unnamed widow,living alone with her only son,sells medicinal herbs in a small town in    Southern  South Korea while doing unlicensed acupuncture to the town's women on the side. Her son Do-joon is shy, but prone to attack anyone who mocks his intellectual disability. A school girl has been found murdered,her body dangled off a roof for the whole town to see. With only circumstantial evidence placing Do-joon near the scene of the crime, the police are happy with their investigation and arrest the boy. The police trick Do-joon into signing a confession, leaving him facing a long-jail sentence. Her quest to prove his innocence forces her to take up arms against an all male-establishment ,the dead girl's enraged family and Don-Joon's duplicitous pal Jin-tae,an amoral layabout who provides some of the films shocking moments. 

 Kim's performance captures perfectly the sense of a woman at odds with a society she can't or doesn't want to understand,her doomed quest leading her into even more uncompromising situations. Bold,unpredictable and quietly devastating,Mother is Bong's great creation.
             

Sono otoko, kyôbô ni tsuki ( Violent Cop)

Kitano's nihilistic 1989 directorial debut is one of the rawest, most uncompromising films ever made,  and, at the same time, arguably one of the most promising debut films ever delivered.  This film bears some resemblance to Dirty Harry but here the lead character is bit psychotic as well. The plot is nothing new but the stylised and arranged presentation made this film so great.

Kitano plays sociopathic detective Azuma,whose single-mindedness leads him to self-destruction. After the suicide of his cop friend Iwaki (who was involved with drugs too) , Azuma breaks all the rules of ethical conduct. Unlike Kitano's other films for which Kitano himself wrote the stories, this is an adaptation of a novel by  Hiashi Nozawa. Kitano's work, however, is ingenious, as screenwriter, director and leading man of this film.  Violent Cop" is greatly shot and accompanied by an insanely brilliant score. Kitano's use of music in his films is another part of his brilliance.

Another Year

It follows a year in the life of a sixtysomething couple , Tom (Jim Broadbent) and Gerri (Ruth Sheen). He is a commercial geologist and she is a counsellor : a member of "the caring professions". They live together in a home on a quiet street somewhere in suburbia that reflects their settled, earthy personalities. They are social creatures and it's their interaction with friends and family that Leigh focuses on , mostly in their home ,over lunch,dinner or a drink at their table. Tom and Gerri are happy couple. The same can't be said for almost anyone around them. Tom's pal Ken ((Peter Wight) is an overweight,chain-smoking alcoholic. Gerri's secretary Mary (Lesley Manville) drinks far too much wine ,she babbles on nervously about insignificant things ,  and she is obviously painfully lonely. She wants to connect with someone, but she also wants that person to be something special. Out of a script developed over months with his cast, Leigh creates a universe we can all find a place in. All the actors are sublime . But Manville shines brightest. 

 Strength of the lead couple's bond ,the warm ease of it, is absolutely necessary as a counter balance to Mary.  Another Year" is just that — time passing through lives, relationships shifting, some spirits flailing while others rest happily within one another.