A Corpse Living

This is a poetic film set in the times of Lenin's NEP. A ballet dancer steals a brooch and gives it as a present to another dancer. This is a crime of passion. A mysterious black ball is after the heroine. She runs away from it and manages to give the brooch in an exquisite pirouette movement, as shiny as diamond facets. What gives a stone its dazzling luster are its polished facets. But the real gem is love, and it's much harder to get than any diamond in the world.

A stranger's call informs Roberta that her estranged brother Frank has died in a small town under bizarre circumstances. Ben, his best friend from college, also gets the call. Arriving just in time for his funeral, it becomes quickly obvious to them that the little slice of small-town America in which they find themselves is like an episode of The Twilight Zone featuring Frank's eccentric friends, his amazing secrets and his stunning final request. Both Ben and Roberta are shocked to discover that Frank not only had a child, but that he has left them responsible for his son's care.

In this realistic, unsentimental portrait of Germany’s dire economic situation, a middle-aged payroll clerk loses his job due to technological advances and, unable to find another, descends into despair. The film’s director, Marie Harder, was one of only a few women directors of the time and was also the head of the German Social Democratic Film Office. She made only two known films before her accidental death in exile in Mexico in 1936.

As children in the loving Ekdahl family, Fanny and Alexander enjoy a happy life with their parents, who run a theater company. After their father dies unexpectedly, however, the siblings end up in a joyless home when their mother, Emilie, marries a stern bishop. The bleak situation gradually grows worse as the bishop becomes more controlling, but dedicated relatives make a valiant attempt to aid Emilie, Fanny and Alexander.

An aging doorman, after being fired from his prestigious job at a luxurious hotel, is forced to face the scorn of his friends, neighbours and society.

Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet fall in love against the wishes of their feuding families. Driven by their passion, the young lovers defy their destiny and elope, only to suffer the ultimate tragedy.

Five unmarried sisters make the most of their simple existence in rural Ireland in the 1930s.

The film consists of a series of tightly interlinked vignettes, the most sustained of which details the story of a man and a woman who are passionately in love. Their attempts to consummate their passion are constantly thwarted, by their families, by the Church and bourgeois society in general.

A group of young people made a bet, according to the terms of which they had to visit a cemetery at midnight.

A doctor kills and embalms a woman in order to preserve her beauty.

A young man discovers the reason his new bride killed herself.

Puerto Rico: Young and pregnant, Wilma fears becoming absorbed by motherhood like her sister Luisa, losing both herself and her artistic aspirations. On this morning, her mother, a santera, presents her with a startling premonition: Life has other plans for her, her children and her family.

Goodnatured J. P. Fippany loses his home and takes to the road on a chicken-wagon with his wife and daughter. The wagon is wrecked in an automobile collision involving Jimmy Pickett, who falls in love with daughter Aida, and through a misunderstanding involving Marseillaise, Fippany's racehorse, his wife Josephine and Aida go to live with relatives. The disconsolate Fippany sells Marseillaise to Jimmy's father, sends the money to his wife, then disappears. Meanwhile, Jimmy finds Aida and convinces her of his love. Marseillaise, badly driven in a race, loses a heat, but Fippany emerges and rides her to victory, following which there is a reconciliation between husband and wife.

In Midnight Madness millionaire diamond miner Michael Bream (Clive Brook) discovers that the woman he’s marrying — funfair shooting-gallery hostess Norma Forbes — is a gold digger. So Bream decides to teach her a lesson, and forces her to live with him in the remote African outback where, eventually, she realizes her true affections.

The news that frames the two days in which the whole story takes place is bad. At first glance, these don't seem like the happiest two days. And yet, they are filled with comedy that is so entertaining and full of twists and turns. What's more, it's a comedy that finds strength in the hope that there is kindness and a deep desire for understanding and openness hidden in each of us. It's a story of our times (as the radio news reports quoted suggest), and yet it transcends our times; after all, it's not every day that the pope is kidnapped.