Pedro Costa’s O Sangre

Vicente (Pedro Hestnes) and Clara (Ines de Medeiros) create their own version of family to combat the darkness in O SANGRE aka Blood (1989), directed by Pedro Costa.

Most film aficionados known that the Cinema Novo movement of the 1960s in Brazil was influenced by both Neorealism and New Wave filmmakers but became an identifiable style of its own. Portugal also had their own Cinema Novo movement in the sixties but it transitioned into a different aesthetic approach in the 1980s known as “The School of Reis,” named after Antonio Reis, a filmmaker and professor at the Lisbon Theater and Film School. Reis influenced a new generation of filmmakers that includes Manuela Viegas, Joaquim Sapinho, Joao Pedro Rodgrigues and Pedro Costa to name a few. Among this group Costa is probably the best known in the U.S. due to his work being exhibited at film festivals and art houses as well as a trilogy of his films known as Letters from Fontainhas being distributed on DVD and Blu-ray by The Criterion Collection. Less known is his 1989 debut feature, O Sangre aka Blood, which Michelle Carey of Senses of Cinema called, “Undoubtedly one of the most remarkable film debuts of the last 20 years.”

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Heavenly Hijinks

Audiences are obviously suckers for films about helpful ghosts or guardian angels because Hollywood has been grinding out variations on this theme for years. Alternately saccharine and sentimental, these films are rarely well received by the critics but there have been a few exceptions over the years, the chief one being Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941), which is really the film that started the whole trend. In its wake, there were numerous contenders covering the same celestial terrain – I Married an Angel (1942), Angel on My Shoulder (1946), Down to Earth (1947) and Angels in the Outfield (1951) – but Here Comes Mr. Jordan remains the most imaginative, comical, and romantic of the lot.

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