Jose Lewgoy

Using comedy and melodrama this film reflects upon the filmmaking process as it follows a young woman's attempts to create an avant garde film. Alice has just lost her father, and just divorced her husband David. She wants to make a film on artist Marcel Duchamp and trace his imaginary trip to Brazil. But first she must find financial backing and a leading man. She finds the latter in Antonio, a musician. She has no luck finding money until she becomes involved with the Baron, a drug trafficker. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Director Werner Herzog, as usual, has spared no one -- especially himself -- in bringing this story of 19th-century African slave trading to the screen. Klaus Kinski plays an enterprising young Brazilian who after impregnating the three daughters of his plantation-owning employer, is sent to West Africa to round up slaves. Kinski goes to great lengths to befriend the very people he hopes to enslave and he eventually manages to overthrow a mad monarch and set himself up as king. As the years pass, Kinski grows wealthy -- and careless. However, despite enslaving the tribe, he does show some signs of humanitarian benevolence. This fifth and final collaboration between director Herzog and Kinski is considered the weakest of the five features. Though the title translates literally as Green Cobra, Cobra Verde was released in the U.S. as Slave Coast. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

American gangster movies of the 1940s are spoofed in this complex crime thriller and comedy. Lucas takes time out from his everyday life in a nearly deserted cinema which is playing a gangster movie. One of the other patrons is a woman who looks almost exactly like the heroine of the movie on the screen, and he begins to pay more attention to her than to what's happening onscreen. Afterwards, the sultry siren, whose name is Suzana, leads him on a dangerous wild goose chase, exposing the ex-boxer-turned-businessman to a criminal world of violence and double-dealing. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

Filled with symbolism, this metaphorical drama by Colombian director Carlos Mayolo is centered on an old mansion, isolated and ambiguous in its actual location. Revolving around the mansion is a static society made up of a pilot, landowner, priest, soldier, and other people representative of professions or occupations. This group is sustained by a kind of "earth mother" named Machiche (Vicky Hernandez) and has retained its status quo for a long time. A young girl (Adriana Herran) appears on the scene and starts to affect the group's long-held equilibrium until cracks, and dissensions begin to crumble the entire social structure. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

This attempt to remake the clever 1977 French farce Un Moment d'Egarement stars 50-film-a-year man Michael Caine as an executive named Matthew Hollis, who, together with friend Victor Lyons (Joseph Bologna), travels to Rio de Janeiro on business. Victor sets out on the town in search of a lambada partner, leaving Matthew to fend for himself against his friend's over-sexed teenage daughter (Michelle Johnson), who's come along for the ride. Soon, Matthew succumbs to her advances, despite his efforts to break off the affair, and finds himself a repeated statutory rapist, at least by American legal standards. The script plays out like an extended version of Three's Company, with lots of near-misses and dumb-dumb humor; critics aptly noticed Caine's apparent discomfort throughout the film. ~ Jeremy Beday, All Movie Guide

Documentarian Les Blank, who filmed Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, trained his cameras on Herzog again, as the eccentric German filmmaker made his epic, Fitzcarraldo, in the Amazon rainforest of Peru. Herzog's production is in trouble right from the start. He begins filming with Jason Robards playing the title role, and Mick Jagger playing Fitzcarraldo's sidekick, Wilbur. With 40 percent of the film shot, Robards becomes ill and goes back to the states, where his doctor will not let him return. Because of the delay, Jagger, with album and tour commitments, is forced to quit the production. Thinking no one can fill the rock star's shoes, Herzog jettisons Jagger's role. He eventually casts his frequent collaborator Klaus Kinski as Fitzcarraldo and begins shooting again. Violent tribal disputes and unpredictable weather hinder the shoot, but the biggest obstacle is Herzog's own quixotic and dangerous determination to film one antique boat smashing down the Amazonian rapids, and the dragging of an identical boat over a mountain from one river to another. Blank interviews members of the cast and crew, including the impoverished Indian extras, and captures the troubles of the seemingly cursed production, but his interviews with Herzog are the focal point of the film. "If I abandon this project," Herzog explains at one point, "I would be a man without dreams, and I never want to live like that. I live my life or I end my life with this project." Herzog later made his own documentary about Kinski, My Best Fiend, which adds to the lore of this infamously difficult shoot. ~ Josh Ralske, All Movie Guide

The eccentric members of a wealthy Brazilian family each go through personal torment, debauchery and intense guilt in this symbolic and gory film. The father has made a fortune in the slaughterhouse business and ignores the feelings of his wife and his workers. He frequents a mulatto woman, who is always seen naked. His daughter and her friend act on their lesbian fantasies before her friend marries her brother. An elderly aunt seduces the brother before she drowns herself in the swimming pool. His lesbian sister shoots the girl, and the boy incestuously attacks his mother. When the mother threatens to leave, the father begs for her to stay and continue the hollow charade of their marriage for the sake of social appearances. The father grovels before his mistress after his daughter slashes her wrists. Any comparison between this dysfunctional family, the Manson family, and Shelley Winters' sick Barker brood in Bloody Mama is all an unfortunate artistic coincidence. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide

This romantic situation comedy finds a young playboy being given advice by his older divorced friend. The mentor's liberal language about love quickly changes when the playboy ends up dating his daughter. He tries to convince his older friend he is really in love with the girl, but the protective father is skeptical. Roberto Carlos provides the rocking rhumba and rock rhythms for this reel ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide

In this comedy, a lovely woman lives and loves freely. Her many lovers do not mind and all are happy until one of the men gets possessive and knocks her around. As the woman recovers in the hospital, her physician suggest she try monogamy for a while. She does, but it is not as much fun and so returns to her freewheeling ways. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Les Fantatiques is set in a mythical South American country. An anti-government faction intends to topple the present regime by whatever means necessary. One of the bolder revolutionaries plants a time-bomb on the plane bearing the President. The outcome of this act of terrorism, and the consequences of that outcome, are predictable, but tense and exciting nonetheless. Pierre Fresnay and Michel Auclair deliver topnotch performances as the titular fanatics (one of whom is a shade more temperate than the other), while Gregoire Aslan is appropriately loathsome as the despotic president. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide