From a prison cell in Madrid, César (Eduardo Noriega), a 25-year-old in a prosthetic mask, tells his story to psychiatrist Antonio (Chete Lera). Flashbacks reveal the following events: good-looking César is attractive to women. At his birthday party, he flirts with Sofía (Penélope Cruz), the girlfriend of his best friend Pelayo (Fele Martínez). Later on, he takes her home and stays the night, although they don't sleep together. The next morning, César's obsessive ex-lover Nuria (Najwa Nimri) pulls up outside Sofia's flat and when she spots César leaving in the morning, she offers him a ride back to her apartment to have sex. On the way there, however, she intentionally crashes the car, committing suicide, and César is horribly disfigured, beyond the help of cosmetic surgery. Sofía can't bear to see him like this and goes back to Pelayo.After César's disfigurement, he begins to have a series of disorienting experiences. Drunk, César falls asleep in the street. On awakening, everything has changed: Sofía now claims to love him and the surgeons restore his lost looks. But as he makes love to Sofía one night, she apparently changes into Nuria. Horrified, César smothers her with a pillow, yet finds everyone else believes Nuria was indeed the woman everyone else calls Sofía.
While he is confined to the prison, fragments of his past return to him as if in a dream. It is gradually revealed that, shortly after his disfigurement, César contracted with Life Extension, a company specializing in cryonics, to be cryogenically preserved and to experience extremely lucid and lifelike virtual reality dreams. Returning to their headquarters, under supervision by prison officers, he discovers they specialise in cryonics with a twist: "artificial perception" or the provision of a fantasy based on the past to clients who are reborn in the future. He had committed suicide at home after sleeping drunk on the street, and was placed in cryonic suspension. His experiences from about the midpoint of the movie onward have been a dream, spliced retroactively into his actual life and replacing his true memories. At the end of the film he elects to wake up and be resurrected. Convinced his life since the drunken night in the street is simply a nightmarish vision created by Life Extension, César leaps from the roof of the company's high-rise headquarters, resolving to open his eyes once more to real life outside the cryonic fantasy.
Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim), nineteen years old, French of Algerian descent, is sentenced to six years in prison for attacking police officers. Alone and illiterate upon his arrival, he falls under the sway of Corsican mobsters, led by Cesar Luciani (Niels Arestrup), who enforces a brutal rule. The prison is divided between two main factions: the Corsicans and the Muslims. Malik keeps to himself. When Luciani forces him to be the unwilling assassin of Reyeb, a Muslim witness, Malik gains the protection of the Corsicans in spite of his origin. Malik serves as a low-level servant to the Corsicans, who treat him with disdain. All the while, he is haunted by visions of the murdered Reyeb. When the bulk of the Corsicans are transferred or released, Luciani is forced to give Malik more responsibility. Having secretly learned Corsican, Malik acts as Luciani's eyes and ears in the prison. When Malik earns the privilege of day-long furloughs outside the prison, Luciani relies on him to conduct his business outside. Ryad, a Muslim friend, teaches Malik to read and write, and the two become close. Ryad exposes Malik to his own heritage, allowing him to meet two other Muslims, Tarik and Hassan, increasing his power within the prison. Malik also becomes involved with a prison drug dealer, Jordi. When Ryad gains an early release due to his testicular cancer, the three partners organize a drug-running enterprise. But when Ryad is kidnapped by the drug dealer Latif, Malik tracks down Latif's partner inside the prison, kidnaps his family, and forces Latif's gang to release Ryad. When Luciani discovers that Malik is using his furloughs for his own personal enterprise, he attacks him. Malik is sent to meet Brahim Lattrache in Marseille, another Muslim, who is involved in a deal between Luciani and the Lingherris, an Italian mafia group.
Lattrache is bitter toward the Corsicans for the murder of Reyeb and holds Malik at gunpoint. When Malik spots a deer warning sign, he remembers a recent dream of deer running in the road. He tells his kidnappers that they are in danger of hitting a deer, which they promptly do. Lattrache is impressed by Malik, calling him a prophet and agreeing to do business with him instead of Luciani, even though Malik has admitted that he killed Reyeb.Luciani believes there is a mole in his organization and decides to use Malik to assassinate Jacky Marcaggi, the Don of the Corsican mafia, for secretly dealing with the Lingherris. But Malik and Ryad have their own plan for Marcaggi: they kill his bodyguards and dump him in a van with his enemy Vettori, Luciani's henchman. Malik takes refuge at Ryad's house with his wife and young son. Ryad's cancer has returned; his decision against more chemotherapy leaves him just six months and he gets Malik's promise to take care of his family when he's gone.Upon Malik's return to the prison, he joins the Muslim faction of the yard. When Luciani tries to approach him, two Muslims intercept and beat him.On the day of his release, Malik is met by Ryad's wife and son outside the prison. They walk off together, followed by a vehicle convoy carrying Malik's new associates.
Betty (Dalle) and Zorg (Anglade) are passionate lovers who live in a shack on the beach. He works as a handyman who does odd jobs to pay the bills. As the film begins, they have only been dating for a week and are in a very passionate stage of their relationship, portrayed in a graphic sex scene. Zorg narrates the story of their relationship via voiceover. He describes Betty as “like a flower with translucent antennae and a mauve plastic heart”. She yearns for a better life and quit her last job as a waitress because she was being sexually harassed by her boss. Zorg's boss asks him to paint the 500 shacks that populate the beach—a fact that he keeps from Betty who thinks they only have to do one. She takes on the project with enthusiasm that quickly turns to anger once she learns the actual number. In response, Betty covers the boss’s car with pink paint.
During a nasty fight, Betty accidentally discovers a series of notebooks that contain a novel Zorg wrote years ago. Upon reading his novel, she realizes his true worth as an intelligent writer and tries to convince Zorg of it too. She is appalled at the menial work Zorg is subjected to and the nonchalant attitude he has toward his situation. Zorg, tries to write again, but cannot become inspired. The boss demands that Betty leave after Zorg is late again to work because of his relationship with Betty. Enraged by this, she trashes their shack again. Unbeknownst to Zorg while he is painting, Betty packs their things. When he is finished and comes back to his shack, Betty burns it and coerces Zorg to hitchhike with her to live with her best friend in the city. Betty and Zorg move in to Betty's friend's place and Zorg does handywork in lieu of rent. The couple's intimate life doesn't skip a beat. Fueled by her passionate love for Zorg, she takes it upon herself to type up Zorg's novel and try to get it published. Zorg again tries to rekindle his imagination and start writing again, but fails to do so. Worse, Zorg receives rejection letters for his novel. Fearing that they might ignite Betty's anger, he hides them. Soon, Betty and Zorg find work at Betty's friend's boyfriend's restaurant.
All is well until Betty mistakes an order and the customer lashes out at her. The fighting escalates to Betty's rage erupting by stabbing the customer in the arm with a fork. Emotionally overwhelmed, Zorg seizes Betty and the scene ends with her crying against the wall in his arms. When Betty discovers the rejection letters, under the guise of a doctors appointment, she takes Zorg to the house of one of the publishers where she assaults the publisher and is again seized by Zorg. Betty's friend's boyfriend's mother dies, and Zorg, Betty, and her friend accompany her friend's boyfriend to the funeral. Her friend's boyfriend inherits his mother's piano store and the house above it, and offers Betty and Zorg to run the store for him and live there in return. They accept and get the place to themselves. Zorg continues as a handyman around his new neighborhood for money and befriends a local store owner, Bob. While working one day, he comes across a white stray cat and takes it in. One day while Betty and Zorg are in bed, Zorg stumbles upon medication Betty is taking. Betty shrugs it off as nothing. Zorg again tries to start another book, but cannot find the inspiration. Everything is smooth for Zorg and Betty until Betty has one of her emotional spells and runs out the house in her underwear. She is chased by Zorg until she calms down.Despite being on birth control, a pregnancy test is positive. Zorg and Betty are overjoyed by the finding. Zorg buys onesies for their prospective baby. Betty goes to the doctor to confirm her pregnancy. Zorg comes home one day to find a medical paper that reads negative for pregnancy. Betty is nowhere in sight, having gone into one of her bouts of emotional frenzy. Zorg comes home the next day to find Betty distraught both mentally and visibly. Frustrated and worried, he shows her that he loves her. Days go by with no sign of Betty getting better. Zorg comes home one day to find blood splattered everywhere and Bob cleaning it up. Bob explains that Betty has poked out her eye in one of her emotional outbursts.Betty is sent to a mental hospital and is unresponsive even to Zorg. He blames the doctor for the medication driving her off the edge and refuses the doctor's recommendation for shock therapy. His frustration with Betty's condition and the doctors causes him to assault the doctor and get kicked out of the hospital. He then gets news that someone wants to publish his book. He later returns incognito to visit Betty. She is totally unaware of the world around her. Still Zorg whispers into her ear his feelings and swears to tell their story. Zorg, out of love and pity, then takes her pillow and smothers her to death. He returns home and makes chili as he was doing the day Betty first came into his shack. The movie ends with him finally writing his next book and hearing the voice of Betty as he did when they were happy together and participating in the small talk they used to have.
The Day of the Beast (Spanish: El día de la Bestia) is a 1995 Spanish black comedy action film co-written and directed by Álex de la Iglesia and starring Álex Angulo, Armando De Razza and Santiago Segura. The story revolves around a Basque Roman Catholic priest dedicated to committing as many sins as possible (Angulo), a death metal salesman from Carabanchel (Segura), and the Italian host of a TV show on the occult (De Razza). By committing multiple sins, the priest hopes to sell his soul, so that he can be at the birth of the Antichrist and kill it before it can destroy the world. The priest and the death metal salesmen kidnap the host, so he can help them in summoning the devil. The ritual requires the blood of a virgin and while on his quest to get it, the priest accidentally kills the salesmen's mother and close friend. During the ritual, in which the main characters go on an "acid trip", the devil manifests and, not being fooled by the priests actions, he does not reveal the location of the Antichrist. The trio eventually track down the birth place of the Antichrist. The salesman is killed by the Antichrist and the devil's minions attack and badly burn the host, but the priest is able to kill them and the Antichrist. After the events, the priest and the host become homeless drifters.
the movie is Directed by Álex de la Iglesia with the production of Andrés Vicente Gómez and it is Written by Jorge Guerricaechevarría and Álex de la Iglesia Starring Álex Angulo, Armando De Razza ,Santiago Segura and Maria Grazia Cucinotta the Music by Battista Lena the Cinematography by Flavio Martínez Labiano.
The film tells the story of four friends who gather in a villa for the weekend with the express purpose of eating themselves to death. Bouffer is French slang for "excessive eating". (the Italian abbuffata means "great eating").The first protagonist, Ugo, owner and chef of a restaurant "The Biscuit Soup" decides to commit suicide, probably because of misunderstandings with his wife. The second is Philippe, a somewhat important magistrate who still lives with his childhood nanny, Nicole, who is overprotective of him to the point of trying to prevent him from having relationships with other women, and who fulfills her own sexual needs with the judge. The third character is Marcello, an Alitalia pilot and womaniser, who is devastated by the fact that he has become impotent. In the first scenes in which he appears, he is intent on making one of his air-hostesses carry off the plane an entire Parmigiano for the villa where he will meet up with the other three protagonists. The fourth and final main character is Michel, who is an effeminate television producer, divorced and tired of his monotonous life. The four come together by car to the beautifully furnished but unused villa owned by Philippe. There they find the old caretaker, Hector, who has innocently prepared everything for the great feast, and a Chinese visitor who is there to offer a job to the magistrate in faraway China, which Philippe politely rejects with the phrase "Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes", quoting Virgil. Once alone, the four began their binge. In one scene Marcello and Hugo race each other to see who can eat oysters the faster. They discuss organizing a little "feminine presence" and decide to invite three prostitutes (not four because Philippe does not want to participate) to come to the house the following evening. Their breakfast next day is interrupted by the arrival of a school class who would like to visit the garden of the villa to see the famous "lime-tree of Boileau", a tree under which the French poet used to sit while looking for inspiration.
The four willingly invite the class not only into the garden but also to view the old Bugatti in the garage and to a magnificent lunch in the kitchen. Above all, they get to know Andrea, the young and buxom teacher, whom they spontaneously invite to dinner that evening. Philippe is dismayed at the notion of the school teacher being in the same company as three prostitutes; he warns her but she appears not to be perturbed. The prostitutes arrive in due course and the atmosphere becomes frivolous and sexually charged. Andrea arrives and embraces the spirit of the party. She is attracted to Philippe, who proposes to marry her. The eating continues unabated. Ugo is responsible for the preparation of the food. Michel, who seems to have been brought up strictly not to fart, suffers from indigestion. His friends encourage him to let go and fart. He goes to the toilet and causes the sanitary pipes to explode. The house is flooded with excrement. Frightened by the turn of events, the prostitutes flee at dawn and leave only Andrea. She seems to sense the purpose of the protagonists and decides to help them in their efforts, establishing a tacit agreement and remaining with them until the death of all four. The first to die is Marcello, after being enraged with his own impotence and following the explosion of the toilet. He becomes exasperated and realizing the futility of the farce, decides to leave the house at night during a snow storm in the old Bugatti that he had repaired earlier in the day with great delight.
His friends find him the next morning, frozen in the driving seat. The first suggestion is to bury Marcello in the garden, but on the advice of Philippe (who, being a judge, warns that there is a severe penalty for the illegal burying of a corpse) they place the body in the villa's cold room, where it remains seated and clearly visible from the kitchen. After Marcello comes Michel, who already suffering from indigestion and crammed to capacity with food (he cannot even lift his legs practising dance, his favourite pastime) literally dies of laughter at the exploding toilet incident. Amid flatulence and worse he collapses on the terrace. His friends place him in the cold room next to Marcello. Shortly afterwards, Ugo prepares an enormous dish made from three different types of liver pâté in the shape of the Dome of St. Peter, which he serves to the remaining diners, Philippe and Andrea, in the kitchen in view of the two dead friends. Philippe and Andrea cannot bring themselves to eat it however. Philippe goes off to bed leaving Andrea to keep Ugo company during his determined effort to eat the entire pâté. Some time later she later calls Philippe back downstairs to help her stop his friend from stuffing himself to death. They cannot dissuade Ugo however, and end up attending to him on the kitchen table, the one feeding him, the other masturbating him until he dies. On the advice of Andrea, his body is left on the kitchen table, in his "domain." Last to die is the diabetic Philippe on the bench under the lime-tree of Boileau and into the arms of Andrea after eating a cake she has made shaped like a pair of breasts. He dies just as another delivery of meat arrives. The delivery men react with incomprehension when Andrea instructs them to leave the meat - whole animals and sides of pork and beef - in the garden (the cold room being full). The film ends bizarrely with a scene of the garden filled with neighbourhood dogs, geese and poultry, and meat carcasses.
Six-year-old Ana is a shy girl who lives in the manor house in an isolated Spanish village on the Castilian plateau with her parents Fernando and Teresa and her older sister, Isabel. The year is 1940, and the civil war has just ended with the Francoist victory over the Republican forces. Her aging father spends most of his time absorbed in tending to and writing about his beehives; her much younger mother is caught up in daydreams about a distant lover, to whom she writes letters. The entire family is never seen together in a single shot. Ana's closest companion is Isabel, who loves her but cannot resist playing on her little sister's gullibility. Teresa writes to her past lover while she seems to stare out the window at the old house where Ana will find the republican soldier: "Little but the walls remain of the house you once knew, I often wonder what became of everything we had there." This supposes the house has a history for her, and implies the escaped republican soldier who will run straight to this now empty and crumbling house and hide in it may have been her lover. At the beginning of the film, a mobile cinema brings Frankenstein to the village and the two sisters go to see it. Ana finds the film more interesting than frightening, particularly the scene where the monster plays benignly with a little girl, then accidentally kills her. She asks her sister, "Why did he kill the girl, and why did they kill him after that?" Isabel tells her that the monster didn't kill the girl and isn't really dead; she says that everything in films is fake. Isabel says the monster is like a spirit, and Ana can talk to him if she closes her eyes and calls him: "It's me, Ana."
Ana's fascination with the story increases when Isabel takes her to a desolate abandoned sheepfold, which she claims is the monster's house. Ana returns alone many times to look for him but finds only a large footprint. One day, Isabel screams from a distant part of the house, and when Ana comes to investigate, she lies perfectly still on the floor, pretending to be dead. That night, Ana sneaks out and while looking at the night sky, closes her eyes. In the next scene, a fugitive republican soldier leaps from a passing train and limps to the sheepfold to hide.Ana finds the soldier hiding in the sheepfold. Instead of running away in terror, she feeds him and even brings him her father's coat and watch. This odd, wordless friendship ends abruptly when the Francoist police come in the night, find the republican soldier and shoot him. The police soon connect Ana's father with the fugitive and assume he stole the items from him. The father discovers which of the daughters had helped the fugitive by noticing Ana's reaction when he produces the pocket watch she had given to him. When Ana next goes to visit him, she finds him gone and fresh blood on the ground. Her father confronts her as she gazes at the blood, and she runs away.While she is wandering in the woods alone that night, she finds a poisonous mushroom her father previously said will kill anyone who eats it. It is not clear if she does so but she later has a vision of the monster; he gazes sadly at her, as in the 1931 film, and kneels beside her as she looks down into water. We see Teresa read a letter she wrote to the man who lives in Nice, France, and burning it unsent, implying the love affair is over or that she will stop communicating with him.A search party finds Ana physically unharmed the next morning, but she withdraws from her family, refusing to speak or eat. The doctor assures her mother that she will gradually forget the shock she's just experienced. Teresa is shown caring for Fernando after he falls asleep at his desk. At the end of the film, Ana recalls what Isabel said about calling the monster, and she stands alone by her bedroom window and closes her eyes.
The film consists of several thematically linked scenes: five gatherings of a group of bourgeois friends, and the four dreams of different characters. The beginning of the film focuses on the gatherings, while the latter part focuses on the dreams, but both types of scenes are intertwined. There are also scenes involving other characters, such as two involving a Latin American female terrorist from the fictitious Republic of Miranda. The film's world is not logical: the bizarre events are accepted by the characters, even if they are impossible or contradictory.The film begins with a bourgeois couple, the Thévenots (Frankeur and Seyrig), accompanying M. Thévenot's colleague Rafael Acosta (Rey) and Mme. Thévenot's sister Florence (Ogier), to the house of the Sénéchals, the hosts of a dinner party. Once they arrive, Alice Sénéchal (Audran) is surprised to see them and explains that she expected them the following evening and has no dinner prepared. The would-be guests invite Mme Sénéchal to join them for dinner at a nearby inn. Finally arriving at the inn, the party find it locked. They knock and are invited in, despite the waitress' seeming reluctance and an ominous mention of "new management". Inside, there are no diners (despite disconcertingly cheap prices) and the sound of wailing voices from an adjoining room. It is learned that the manager died a few hours earlier and his former employees are holding vigil over his corpse, awaiting the coroner. The party hurriedly leave.Two days later, the bourgeois friends attempt to have lunch at the Sénéchals, but he (Cassel) and his wife escape to the garden to have sex instead of joining them. One of the bourgeois friends takes this as a sign that perhaps the Sénéchals are aware the police are coming (fearing the discovery of the men's involvement in cocaine trafficking) and were leaving to avoid arrest. The party leaves again in panic.
Then the women visit a tea house, which turns out to have run out of all beverages - tea, coffee, milk, and herbal tea, although it finally turns out that they do have water. While they are waiting, a soldier tells them about his childhood and how, after the death of his mother, his education was taken over by his cold-hearted father. The soldier's mother (as a ghost) informs him that the man is not his real father, but in fact killed the soldier's father during a duel over his mother. Following his ghost mother's request, the soldier poisons and kills the culprit. When the Senechals return from their garden after sneaking off to make love, their friends are gone but they meet a bishop who had arrived shortly after. He greets them in their gardener's clothing, and they angrily throw him out. When he returns in his bishop's robes, they embrace him with deference, exposing their prejudice, snobbery, and hypocrisy. The bishop asks to work for them as their gardener. He explains to them about his childhood - about how his parents were murdered by arsenic poisoning, and the culprit was never apprehended. Later on in the film, he goes to bless a dying man, but when it turns out that the man had killed the bishop's parents, he first blesses him, then fires a shotgun, killing the man - thus closing the circle of hypocrisy.Various other aborted dinners ensue, with interruptions including the arrival of a group of French army officers who join the dinner, or the revelation that a French colonel's dining room is in fact a stage set in a theatrical performance, during a dream sequence. Ghosts make frequent appearances in what seemed to be disconcerting dream sequences.Buñuel plays tricks on his characters, luring them toward fine dinners that they expect, and then repeatedly frustrating them in inventive ways. They bristle, and politely express their outrage, but they never stop trying; they relentlessly expect and pursue all that they desire, as though it were their natural right to have others serve and pamper them. He exposes their sense of entitlement, their hypocrisy, and their corruption. In the dream sequences, he explores their intense fears - not just of public humiliation, but of being caught by police, and mowed down by guns. At least one character's dream sequence is later revealed to be nested, or embedded, in another character's dream sequence. As the dreams-within-dreams unfold, it appears that Buñuel is also playing tricks on his audience, as we try to make sense of the story.A recurring scene throughout the film, wherein the six people are walking silently and purposefully on a long, isolated country road toward a mysterious destination, is also in the final sequence.
