A newly married couple looking for a house come up against a crooked real estate agent.
A film about puppets, the creative process, and how conflict can end in resolution.
The Flicker Alley DVD "Georges Méliès: Encore New Discoveries (1896-1911)" misidentified a partial hand-colored print of the 1906 film "Alchimiste Parafaragaramus ou La cornue infernale" (The Mysterious Retort) as this film, "L'hallucination de l'alchimiste" (An Hallucinated Alchemist) from 1897, which continues to be considered a lost film.
The story begins with the finding of a wonderful peach which comes floating down a small stream and is brought to shore by a little Japanese woman, who takes it to her home. It there transpires that she and her husband are still mourning the loss of a baby, and the wonderful peach when it is cut brings healing to their sorrow, for as the father's hands separate the two parts of the luscious fruit, between them miraculously appears the figure of a tiny baby.
For this year's Movies Issue, The New York Times Magazine commissioned lines from an eclectic and talented group of screenwriters — writers responsible for some of the best scripts of 2013. We asked them each to write a single line for us — not a scene, a script or a scenario, but simply an intriguing, amusing or captivating line of dialogue. Then we gave these lines to one of the great movie artists of our time: the cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, a two-time Oscar winner. Kaminski used these lines as inspiration to create 11 original (very) short films. Each short evokes a style or genre of the cinematic past and stars an actor who gave an especially memorable performance in 2013.
"Films Confiscated from a French Brothel" is a bare all Avant-garde Anthology homage to silent stag films.
When a man looks at the photo strip he just took of himself in a photo booth, he cannot believe what he sees.
When Jim Rittenshaw learns that his friend Richard Desborough is having an affair with Jim's wife Daisy, Jim kills Richard. The murdered man's ghost then takes up residence and attempts to positively influence the lives of those he had wronged.
One of the first, of not the first, film adaptation of Grimm's fairytale.
A Jew who mocked Jesus on the cross is visited by a devil and an angel.
A brief fantasy tale involving a strange fairy who can produce and deliver babies coming out of cabbages. This film is lost or never existed. Copies of it online are actually the 1900 remake.
A prince discovers an enchanted beauty turned into a frog by Koschei the Immortal. After Koschei steals her again, the prince goes on a dangerous quest to free the land of the evil.
A beautiful and touching story based on Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale "The Steadfast Tin Soldier". A tin soldier without a leg sees a beautiful paper ballerina and falls in love. While trying to reach her, he falls from the window and has to overcome countless obstacles to see her again.
Schoolgirl Mami Sakura discovers that she has superpowers. She can sense other people in trouble and teleport to help them, but she keeps her secret double-life hidden from her parents with the help of her schoolfriend, Kazuo Takahata. In this short film, Mami uses her powers to make a puppet show for deprived children.
From its epic conception to its film death, the fantasized and fictitious portrait of the film-maker Walerian Borowczyk : Boro-in-the-box discovers a cruel and obscene world, crosses commonplace and colorful adventures, from Poland to Paris, caressing erotic birds and organic cameras in a phantasmagorical alphabet primer.
The land is filled with people in urns chattering at top speed, but only to themselves, not to one another. The focus goes to three people: a man, his mistress and his wife.
A fairy godmother magically turns Cinderella's rags to a beautiful dress, and a pumpkin into a coach. Cinderella goes to the ball, where she meets the Prince - but will she remember to leave before the magic runs out? Méliès based the art direction on engravings by Gustave Doré. First known example of a fairy-tale adapted to film, and the first film to use dissolves to go from one scene to another.
A neurotic inventor creates a time machine and gets lost traveling around yesterday.
"Román s basou" is another short by master a stop-motion puppet-animator Jiri Trnka. The story is based on Anton Chekhovs story "Roman s Kontrabasom". Princess Bibulova decides to go fishing along the river while not far away a bass player leaves his two companions to go for a swim.
Lillian Travers, a New York heiress, pops down to Florida to surprise her fiancé, Fred Cassadene, the house doctor at a prominent Saint Augustine hotel. The surprise, however, is Lillian's when she finds Fred in a series of compromising situations with a certain wealthy widow staying there. When she can take no more, Lillian discovers a box forgotten at an old curiosity shop in which lies a hundred-year-old secret: a vial of four rare and exotic African seeds that promises to transform whoever swallows one from a woman to a man or vice versa.