Tamás Major

Napoleon's army besieges Győr. Mr. Léner, the grain merchant, is deeply hoping for the French emperor's victory, hoping an alliance with him could assure Hungary's independence from the Habsburg rule.

Set during the fading glory of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the film tells of the rise and fall of Alfred Redl, an ambitious young officer who proceeds up the ladder to become head of the Secret Police only to become ensnared in political deception.

A German stage actor finds unexpected success and mixed blessings in the popularity of his performance in a Faustian play as the Nazis take power in pre-WWII Germany. As his associates and friends flee or are ground under by the Nazi terror, the popularity of his character supercedes his own existence until he finds that his best performance is keeping up appearances for his Nazi patrons.

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Mocorgó, the well-meaning worker boy, is a tough guy. In his 40s he is still a mechanic's apprentice, but he is disappointed by his family, women and friends, and becomes a criminal. He goes to prison several times and tells the story of his life to the writer, who follows his story until 1956, until Mocorgó's death.

This film describes the narrator's childhood, the years before and after the Hungarian Soviet Republic, in a burlesque and fabulous style and with the humour of a child's fantasy.

Bátky János a 20th century intellectual studies the secret of the Rosicrucians in London libraries during the day and in the evening takes pleasure in the "decent" everyday joys offered by the fair sex. He gets involved in the wildest ghost-story in the mysterious Wales castle of the Pendragons, where Earl of Gwynnedd from the 18th century is making experiments to prove his ancestors' slogan, "the resurrection of the body". In the meantime St. Claire, a beautiful, demonic woman and her companions try to kill him for the huge legacy.

Count János Buttler rushes home to his parents and his beloved for the school holidays. On the way, they stop at Baron Dőry's house, where János is deviously trapped. In the presence of false witnesses, he is forcibly married to Baron Dőry's pregnant daughter. The swearing priest is the father of the unborn child. Although Buttler, his family and friends do their utmost to have the marriage annulled, the Church and the court, fearing for his authority, will not allow it. John Buttler and his lover therefore choose another way to divorce.

Kicsi Dániel, the young virtuoso pianist gets a separate apartment in the ten-storey block of flats. He rehearses all the time, irregularly, day and night, disturbing thus the peace of the dwellers in the thin-walled house. Inquisition begins in the name of equal rights for inhabitants.

SS doctor during the war worked on the serum of cancer, but discovered a terrible poison, one vial is enough to kill 100 000 people. 20 years after the war, the old Nazi gets out of prison, and the hunt for him and his discovery begins.

The Sultan of Zanzibar has a harbor infested with sharks, which makes it impossible for ships to trade with him. In an attempt to fix the problem, he brings twelve hippos into the harbor to keep the sharks away. His idea works well enough, but once the hippos are no longer a novelty and the people no longer feed them, they begin to starve. After the hungry hippos rampage through the city looking for food, Aban-Khan, the king's adviser, slaughters all the hippos except one, a little hippo named Hugo.

A young man has his hepatic duct replaced with a plastic tube after an accident but starts to get worried how this will affect his manliness.

On the novel by Mór Jókai. The first half of the XVIII century. Several decades of life of a noble family Karpati.

The young Valkó wants to plan a block of apartments that will still be modern fifty years from now. His ambitious plans are continuously rejected by his manipulative and careless superiors. So instead of the modern block of flats he only plans a bachelor apartment.

PFC Molnár decides his WWII services are over, and with serious money hidden in his hand grenades, he heads to an abandoned mansion where he encounters not only the sour butler but a bunch of others who also try to wimp out of their duties.

This is a romantic biographical film about Franz Liszt. In a distinguished saloon of Paris, the unknown composer, Liszt, defeats the renown Thalberg at a piano competition. Through his playing, he wins the favours and later the hand of the countess D'Agoult. A daughter is born in their marriage, Cosima. Liszt is better and better known, Marie introduces him to the circle of artists.

The film is a historic parable about the topicality of revolution. 1514. The peasants' uprising is over, Dózsa has been arrested. Werbőczy tries to get the imprisoned peasant leader deny the revolution and offers him the lives of his people in exchange.

Returning from his imprisonment in Russia during the First World War, Franz Ferdinand Trotta, a young KuK officer, discovers how much the defeat has transformed Vienna and his people. He is stunned by the new order of things. Having lost his entire fortune and his wife, who is having a sapphic relationship with a Hungarian artist, he tries to regain his place in a world that appears devastated.

Winter of 1944, the last days of the war. When the roads and houses ceased to exist and the bottom of the cellars become filled with life, when fortunes were lost and countries burned up, her used coat was only important to Mama, the cloak-room servant of a local dance-school. Her son stole it to sell it for twenty pengő. He did it because Aranka Fussbaum's love cost money. There is no honour left in such a destroyed world. Yet still they start looking for that coat... (Elemér Ragályi won Best camera with this movie in Montreal, 1979, and in Budapest, 1980.)

This absurd story, bordering on the drawing-room comedy, portrays the practices of abusing power and the insolence of bureaucracy through the revolting of a young designer-engineer of the Railway Tilting Examination Board. The ambitious Pócsik works persevearingly on how to compensate for the tilting of railway carriages in bends. His jealous bosses, however, use their best efforts to block the development of an innovation.

The pseudo crime story honours the bohemian world at the beginning of the century.

Dery is a grande dame actress of the Sarah Bernhardt school of big-gesture theater. Her beauty and popularity is fading, and a new school of acting which involves the use of one's own emotions (a-la Eleanora Duse) is emerging in the person of her younger Viennese rival. She thinks of retiring from the stage, and reunites briefly with her estranged husband in a newly-built manor in the country. Finding that life there is boring, she returns to town, the theater, and her old friends.

In this caricature-like film an old film director offers his memories of his career to his former student, now a studio manager, as an idea for a new film. We can see the director in Berlin in the twenties, where his task is to make a film star of Hungarian origin cry out of homesickness.

As the unforgettable Auntie Zsófi, the unforgettable Dajka Margit lives with naive simplicity and wisdom in her secluded little villa. Everyone is in a hurry around her, but she puts the cottage cheese dumplings or the casserole in her oven every day with a healthy spirit. He sells his peach orchard for good money to help his daughter. Lawyer and Bunko, two petty criminals, get wind of the money, but they don't count on the ingenuity of the fair old woman and her fearsome flatmate, the black cat.

Réb went to the United States about 20 years ago and in the eighties he returns to Budapest with his teenager daughter...

13 March 1965 (Hungary)

Private inspector Hável happens to travel on the train which is attacked at Biatorbágy. His attention is drawn to a suspicious man, and in the next few days he confirms that it was indeed him who committed the crime. Yet the police accuses not the lunatic Marschalkó but the communists. Summary justice is declared.

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The rich love wealth and believe that if they don't keep accumulating it, the world will collapse. It is this human weakness that Volpone, the old con man, builds on, inventing an unexpected trick to play a sickly old man about to die, who, with the help of his servant and skilful apprentice, tricks the hypocritical but wealthy Venetian citizens into doing anything in the hope of a rich inheritance. How things don't turn out as planned...

At the end of World War II, Bálint, a deserter tries to obtain forged papers. He gets involved in funny adventures

The film is set in Budapest, 1924. Laundryman Ede Minarik's only passion is football. His dream is to see his team, Csabagyöngye, qualify for the first division. For this goal he would be willing to sacrifice everything he has. But he has nothing, even footballers just barely. The team is just like the times. But still, "we need a team!"

During World War II Carlotta, the circus owner maintains herself, her lover and her rather run-down circus-team by illegal man-smuggling. In the year of 1944, besides the usual refugees, she even has to take Professor Máté, the renown mathematician to the Yugoslavian partisans. The team is joined by Carlotta's psychotic son who has escaped from an asylum.

Andras Kovacs' film, considered one of the most important Hungarian films of the 1960s, centers around four men who await trial for their involvement in the massacre of several thousand Jewish and Serbian people of Novi Sad in 1942. Each denies any responsibility, claiming that they were only following orders. The film is significant for its willingness to address the subject of Hungary's role in WWII, which was taboo at the time of the its release.

In modern Hungary, con artist Bender Oszkár and his motley crew - Barangó and a band of small-time schemers - embark on a series of outrageous scams to track down an “illegal” millionaire and seize ten million for themselves. As they exploit every trick in the book - fake charities, crooked roulette tables, forged documents - their madcap pursuit of easy riches exposes the absurdities and corruptions of contemporary life, with Bender’s fate hanging on whether his “great maneuver” will pay off or blow up in his face.

The dance play is based on the legend of the girl who was danced to death. Using the tools of folk dance, classical ballet and modern dance, the three parts tell the tale of the black man's spell that takes the girl away from her lover in a setting of folk tales, 18th century Rococo and the 1960s metropolis. But in the modern world, in the ballroom bustle of the last part, the girl is no longer alone, but with the help of the other young people, she is freed from the magic of the red shoe and manages to stay with her lover.

We have linguists, we have literary men, we have newspapers, actors, musicians, but we have no national opera!", lamented the champions of national revival in the middle of the last century. Hungarian music culture at home is limited to the performance of works by foreign composers. And the public demands Hungarian opera, and such a challenge is not easy to meet. So let's see who is up to the task!

In December 1956 there is a chaotic situation in Hungary. The revolution is put down by the Soviet army. People leave the country in large numbers for fear of revenge. A young soldier (György Angeli) who also took a part in the revolution, takes a train to Vienna together with his friend (Dániel Szerencsés). Written by Tamas Patrovics

Péter tries to make a film on "Swan-Lake". At the weekend, shooting stops and the staff goes home. Péter leaves for home with his wife, Judit, but as he catches sight of a girl at the station, he cannot resist the temptation and gets off the train.

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Just a few days before the foreign delegation arrives at the ZOO, someone scribbled the elephant with unwashable paint.

A murder has been committed in a block of flats in Pest. Almost all the dwellers of the building behave in a suspicious way at the beginning of the investigation, although it is their everyday lapses they try to hide. In spite of the janitor's unpleasant comments, light is gradually thrown upon the case.

The film is a cabaret style, satirical montage of the political events and everydays

Having helped his brother King Edward IV take the throne of England, the jealous hunchback Richard, Duke of Gloucester, plots to seize power for himself. Masterfully deceiving and plotting against nearly everyone in the royal court, including his eventual wife, Lady Anne, and his brother George, Duke of Clarence, Richard orchestrates a bloody rise to power before finding all his gains jeopardized by those he betrayed.

"Are you looking to buy a car? Not sure which one to buy? Clueless? We can solve all your problems. Watch our latest film! All your problems will be solved because we'll talk you out of them for the price of a single ticket." - says the comedy's obliging narrator (Ervin Kibédi), who tries to talk the viewer out of buying a car. To do this, he tells the audience some instructive and humorous car-related stories...

Divided into two different halves separated by mood and subject matter, this is an uneven drama about the experience of one Hungarian Jew before and during the fascist takeover of Budapest. The hero Pali (Zoltan Bezeredi) arrives back in Budapest from the U.S. and meanders among the intellectual and social elite before he leaves for a brief stay in England. There he has an even briefer affair with a happy-go-lucky aspiring actress (Anna Kubik), and after a few other encounters with movie mavens, he heads back to Budapest -- quite inexplicably. The rest of the film deteriorates into a dark realm of hatred and violence.

"Ripacsok" is a great movie with great soundtrack, acting, cinematography, direction, etc. The world of "artists", hamming actors, good clowns and bad clowns... A unique movie in many ways. Pál Sándor is a very good hungarian director, watch his movies (especially the slightly better "Régi idõk focija") if you have the chance.

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