Summary: Based on a story by Graham Greene, it charts the post-Second World War moral and material decay of Western Europe via the adventures of a naive American writer, Holly Martins, who goes to Vienna in search of his old friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles on magnificent form). At first told that he is dead,…
Category: Media Studies
Thelma and Louise – Summary – Analysis
Summary: Thelma is a neglected housewife who ditches her bullying husband to spend a weekend fishing with her friend Louise, a hash-house waitress who drives an impeccably maintained 1966 Thunderbird convertible. A quick stop at a bar leads to trouble when Thelma is accosted by a local man. Louise shoots the guy. The two women…
Milk of Sorrow – Summary – Analysis
Summary: The film portrays the life of Fausta (Magaly Solier), a young woman whose family has moved from the Andes to Manchay, one of the pueblos jovenes or shantytowns which has emerged on the outskirts of Lima. Fausta grieves for the loss of her mother, Perpetua (Bárbara Lazón), who dies in the story’s opening sequences….
Tesis / Thesis (1996 Movie): Summary & Analysis
Summary: Film student Ángela is writing her thesis on violence in audiovisual media. At the university, she discovers the body of her thesis director, Prof. Figueroa, who died while watching a video that turns out to be a snuff film. The plot of this psychological thriller unfolds through Ángela’s research on the disappearance of a…
Taxi Driver (1976 Movie): Summary & Analysis
Summary: Travis Bickle, seemingly a Vietnam War veteran, gets a job working as a taxi driver in New York City. As he drives around the city he increasingly feels himself to be surrounded by the worst of humanity but manages to find some sort of hope in Betsy, a worker for presidential hopeful, Senator Palatine….
Twilight Samurai: Summary & Analysis
Summary: In the nineteenth century at the end of Japan’s feudal age, widowed, low-ranking samurai Seibei Iguchi is an accountant at his regional lord’s storehouse, where he has been nicknamed ‘Twilight’ (Tasogare) because he refuses to socialise after working hours. Instead, he rushes home to care for his two daughters, Kayano (age ten) and Ito…
Sweet Sweetback’s Badass Song: Summary & Analysis
Summary: Following an unfortunate run-in with the LAPD, resulting in the injury of two police officers, our eponymous hero (Van Peebles), a sexworker-turned-revolutionary, flees Los Angeles and makes his way to Mexico. Along Sweetback’s journey, we encounter a cross section of the city’s citizens, from storefront preachers to prostitutes and hippies. Lauded as the inspiration…
The Sweet Hereafter (1997 Movie): Summary & Analysis
Summary: The Sweet Hereafter is a film about trauma. After a fatal bus crash that kills almost all of a town’s children, a lawyer tries to rouse some of the victims’ families to pursue a class action suit. The young girl, who is the sole child to survive the crash, and also a survivor of…
Sunrise (1927 Movie): Summary & Analysis
Summary: A nameless woman of the city vacations in the countryside, seducing a man, a simple farmer with a wife and a child. She convinces him to drown his wife, but at the last moment, he cannot bring himself to do it. After the wife escapes to the city and the man follows her, they…
Star Wars (Episode 4, 1977) – Summary – Analysis
Summary: Princess Leia Organa, a member of the Rebel Alliance, steals the plans for the Death Star, an Imperial space station. She is captured by Darth Vader, the Galactic Empire’s deadliest enforcer, but not before programming the plans into the ’droid R2-D2. R2 and C3PO escape to the planet Tatooine to deliver Leia’s plans to…