Movies: Joaquim Pinto

Manoel de Oliveira plays his film in three stages: the first part - a play, the second can be roughly defined as a silent film (with the behind the scenes read excerpts from Beckett works), but in the end the director brilliantly performs the same ma...

This odd film is a major representative of an even odder film genre: direct-to-celluloid opera. It was commissioned by the Portuguese master of style, director Manoel de Oliveira from composer João Paes. Musically, it ranges from 19th-century romanti...

Lisbon, 1989. A middle-aged poor man, tormented by an illness, lives in a cheap room in a family boarding house, in the old section of the city's waterfront....

After receiving a visit from a messenger of God, João de Deus wins his buddy's girlfriend through a roll of the dice....

An impossible love. Two young people who love each other. Vera and João can’t find in this life the space, time, or identity to resolve their love story....

A surreal odyssey in which a melancholic maidservant crosses paths with a homicidal little boy, travels to a tiny island of pirates and encounters a man with multiple personalities....

Jim is a small child who lives in an inn run by his parents. The arrival of a strange captain to the Island they live will trouble his existence and tip him into an universe of adventures....

Monteiro moved far away from the visual opulence defined by his earlier films with his inspired adaptation of radical Swiss writer Robert Walser’s anti-fairy tale. Carefully restricting the image track, Monteiro maintains an almost totally black scre...

A mentally unstable woman and her son move to a sprawling mansion in Portugal to grow roses....

When novelist Alessandro Battavia commits suicide, a taxi driver named Evangile and her brother Nord believe they are characters imagined in a novel, probably one written by God....

Laura Rossellini, a widow from Rome, vacations on the Algarve coast one hot summer. One day while sunbathing, she finds a wounded man named Robert drifting in the surf on a rubber raft. She takes him home, and, after he is revived, learns his story. ...

A long-hidden, personal doc about leaving a beloved house by the late, revered Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira....

An ice-cream seller lusts after the female employees in his shop....

The shady side of an Italian textile trade in northern Germany is the subject of this slow-paced but atmospheric drama featuring Alberto Sordi as Totonno, a low-level, petty criminal anxious to move up a somewhat crooked ladder. Rising to the rank of...

This visually striking drama is taken from the classic Japanese novel Tales Of Genji by Marasaki Shikibu. Set in modern Portugal, Joao (Luis Miguel Cintra) is a left-wing political leader and ladies man with a bright future. His ex-wife Isabel (Manue...

Roberto is one of those men to whom simulation has become the greatest art. He is an unmoved, inscrutable, mysterious man. But the truth is that Robert feels an intimate, deep tedium. The boredom of those who have already exhausted all the pleasures ...

During the century of the Spanish Gold, Doña Prouhèze, wife of a nobleman, deeply loves Don Rodrigo, who is forced to leave Spain and go to America. Meanwhile Prouhèze is sent to Africa to rule the city of Mogador. Ten years later Rodrigo leaves Amer...

A look back at the history of Brancusi's futuristic golden bronze phallus "Princess X" that is in fact a bust of Napoleon's incredible great-niece, Marie Bonaparte....

Jan thinks he is Swedish-Danish, but after his mother's death he discovers he was adopted. As his world begins to fall apart, he decides to find his birth parents. The hunt leads him to Portugal - in a taxi - where more surprises await him....

Seventeen experts on history and arts deliver brief lessons on their favorite subjects, considered the most relevant to cover nine hundred years of Portuguese culture. The camera shows from a distance, or in minute detail, the monuments or art pieces...