The Parent Trap is a 1961 American romantic comedy film written and directed by David Swift. It stars Hayley Mills as a pair of teenage twins plotting to reunite their divorced parents by switching places with each other. Maureen O'Hara and Brian Keith play the parents. Although the plot is very close to that of the 1945 film Twice Blessed, The Parent Trap is based on the 1949 German children's novel Das doppelte Lottchen by Erich Kästner.
David Lawrence Schwimmer is an American actor, director, comedian, and producer. He gained worldwide recognition for portraying Ross Geller in the sitcom Friends, for which he received a Screen Actors Guild Award and a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series in 1995. While still acting in Friends, his first leading film role was in The Pallbearer (1996), followed by roles in Kissing a Fool;Six Days, Seven Nights;Apt Pupil ; and Picking Up the Pieces (2000). He was then cast in the miniseries Band of Brothers (2001) as Herbert Sobel.
Autumn Sonata is a 1978 drama film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman, and starring Ingrid Bergman, Liv Ullmann and Lena Nyman. Its plot follows a celebrated classical pianist and her neglected daughter who meet for the first time in years, and chronicles their painful discussions of how they have hurt each other. It was the only collaboration between Ingrid Bergman and Ingmar Bergman.
The Castle is the last novel by Franz Kafka. In it a protagonist known only as "K." arrives in a village and struggles to gain access to the mysterious authorities who govern it from a castle supposedly owned by Graf Westwest.
Bicycle Thieves, also known as The Bicycle Thief, is a 1948 Italian neorealist drama film directed by Vittorio De Sica. It follows the story of a poor father searching in post-World War II Rome for his stolen bicycle, without which he will lose the job which was to be the salvation of his young family.
Dani Levy is a Swiss filmmaker, theatrical director, screenwriter and actor.
The Spanish Prisoner is a 1997 American neo-noir suspense film, written and directed by David Mamet and starring Campbell Scott, Steve Martin, Rebecca Pidgeon, Ben Gazzara, Felicity Huffman and Ricky Jay. It tells a story of corporate espionage conducted through an elaborate confidence game.
Aleksandar Hemon is a Bosnian-American author, essayist, critic, television writer, and screenwriter. He is best known for the novels Nowhere Man (2002) and The Lazarus Project (2008), and his scriptwriting as a co-writer of The Matrix Resurrections (2021).
Dialogue Between a Priest and a Dying Man is a dialogue written by the Marquis de Sade while incarcerated at the Château de Vincennes in 1782. It is one of the earliest known written works from de Sade to be dated with certainty, and was first published in 1926 together with an edition of Historiettes, Contes et Fabliaux. It was subsequently published in English in 1927 by Pascal Covici in a limited, hand-numbered edition of 650 copies.
The Good German is a 2006 American neo-noir crime film. A film adaptation of Joseph Kanon's 2001 novel of the same name, it was directed by Steven Soderbergh, and stars George Clooney, Cate Blanchett, and Tobey Maguire. Set in Berlin following the Allied victory over the Nazis, it begins as a murder mystery but weaves in elements involving the American postwar employment of Nazi rocket scientists in Operation Paperclip.
Éva Márta Szőke Ivanovics, known professionally as Eva Bartok, was a Hungarian-British actress. She began acting in films in 1950, and her last credited appearance was in 1966. She acted in more than 40 American, British, German, Hungarian, French, and Israeli films. She is best known for appearances in Blood and Black Lace, The Crimson Pirate, Operation Amsterdam, and Ten Thousand Bedrooms.
Suite française is the title of a planned sequence of five novels by Irène Némirovsky, a French writer of Ukrainian-Jewish origin. In July 1942, having just completed the first two of the series, Némirovsky was arrested as a Jew and detained at Pithiviers and then Auschwitz, where she was murdered, a victim of the Holocaust. The notebook containing the two novels was preserved by her daughters but not examined until 1998. They were published in a single volume entitled Suite française in 2004.
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold is a 1965 British spy film based on the 1963 novel of the same name by John le Carré. The film stars Richard Burton, Claire Bloom, and Oskar Werner. It was directed by Martin Ritt, and the screenplay was written by Paul Dehn and Guy Trosper.
Maria Schrader is a German actress, screenwriter, and director. She directed the award-winning 2007 film Love Life and the 2020 Netflix miniseries Unorthodox, for which she won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Directing for a Limited Series. She also starred in the German international hit TV series Deutschland 83 (2015), known for being the first German-language series broadcast on US television.
Mumblecore is a subgenre of independent film characterized by naturalistic acting and dialogue, low budgets, an emphasis on dialogue over plot, and a focus on the personal relationships of young adults. Filmmakers associated with the genre include Andrew Bujalski, Lynn Shelton, the Duplass brothers Mark and Jay, Greta Gerwig, Aaron Katz, Joe Swanberg, and Ry Russo-Young. In many cases, though, these directors reject the term. The genre is a mostly American phenomenon. The related term mumblegore has been used for films mixing the mumblecore and horror genres.
High Treason is a 1929 film based on a play by Noel Pemberton Billing. It was directed by Maurice Elvey, and stars James Carew, Humberstone Wright, Benita Hume, Henry Vibart, Hayford Hobbs, Irene Rooke, and Jameson Thomas. Raymond Massey makes his first screen appearance in a small role. The film was initially produced as a silent but mid-way during production, Elvey was pushed by the studio to add sound to the film in order to cash in on the talkies. Although a third of the film was filmed in sound, Elvey maintained much of the silent footage and dubbed over the dialogue for shots that were originally silent, with Elvey himself voicing some of the minor characters, which he admitted when interviewed by the Manitoba Free Press shortly after the film was released in the US. Likewise, BIP's Blackmail, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, was also turned into a sound picture mid-way during production and many of the silent scenes used dubbed dialogue and sound effects in a similar fashion to High Treason.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a fabricated text purporting to detail a Jewish plot for global domination. Largely plagiarized from several earlier sources, it was first published in Imperial Russia in 1903, translated into multiple languages, and disseminated internationally in the early part of the 20th century. It played a key part in popularizing belief in an international Jewish conspiracy.
Went to Coney Island on a Mission from God... Be Back by Five is a 1998 American film directed by Richard Schenkman and written by Schenkman and Jon Cryer. It premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival.
Lena Dunham is an American writer, director, actress, and producer. She is the creator, writer, and star of the HBO television series Girls (2012–2017), for which she received several Emmy Award nominations and two Golden Globe Awards. Dunham also directed several episodes of Girls and became the first woman to win the Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directing – Comedy Series. She started her career writing, directing, and starring in her semi-autobiographical independent film Tiny Furniture (2010), for which she won an Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay. She has since written and directed the 2022 films Sharp Stick and Catherine Called Birdy.
Niki Reiser is a Swiss film score composer and flautist. He is considered one of the most outstanding film composers of the German-speaking countries, winning the German Film Award five times. His debut was in 1986 the score for the film Du mich auch, directed by Dani Levy, for whom he has composed all further scores. He had his breakthrough with the music for the film Beyond Silence, directed by Caroline Link in 1996.
