The best Dénes Ujlaky’s movies
If you love cinema, you will share this ranking of the best Dénes Ujlaky’s movies, although you may have ordered them differently. In any case, we hope you love it and with a little luck discovering a movie that you still don’t know about Dénes Ujlaky.
The Photographer of Mauthausen
6.7/10
Spanish photographer Francesc Boix, imprisoned in the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp, works in the SS Photographic Service. Between 1943 and 1945, he hides, with the help of other prisoners, thousands of negatives, with the purpose of showing the freed world the atrocities committed by the Nazis, exhaustively documented. He will be a key witness during the Nuremberg Trials.
Citizen X
7.4/10
Based on the true story of a Russian serial killer who, over many years, claimed victim to over 50 people. His victims were mostly under the age of 17. In what was then a communists state, the police investigations were hampered by bureaucracy, incompetence and those in power. The story is told from the viewpoint of the detective in charge of the case.
The Door
6.4/10
This is a story of a special relationship between two women, a writer and her maid.
American Torso
6.2/10
The film depicts the lives of veterans of the 1848 Hungarian Revolution in the American Civil War, based in part on an Ambrose Bierce story. The whole film was re-edited using his own method called "light editing" in order to make it resemble a damaged silent film from the late 1800s.
Another Way
7.1/10
Political and sexual repression in Hungary, just after the revolution of 1956. In 1958, the body of Eva Szalanczky, a political journalist, is discovered near the border. Her friend Livia is in hospital with a broken neck; Livia's husband, Donci, is under arrest. In a flashback to the year before, we see what leads up to the tragedy. Eva gets a job as a writer. She meets Livia and is attracted to her. Livia feels much the same, but as a married woman, has doubts and hesitations. In their work, they (and Eva in particular) bang up against the limits of telling political truths; in private, they confront the limits of living out sexual and emotional truth.
Passion
7.4/10
György Fehèr’s aim was to “make a film which is similar to the last salvaged print of a long lost film”. The passions he investigates are centred on primeval fears and cravings and a sense of inescapable doom. Shot in powerful black and white with excellent central performances.
Tabló
5.3/10
Karcsi, a Roma policeman, lives with Eva, a Swede. One day he is called to the scene of the murder of a wealthy trafficker named Schulter. He begins to investigate the crime, interrogate neighbours and suspects, and untangle a complex situation - one that he, himself, complicates even further. For he is a gypsy, who despite being adopted and raised by "regular" Hungarians, has his nose rubbed in his minority status every day. The film, which is based on the novel by Ákos Kertész, is a shrewd genre work full of dusky humour and surreal situations. Tabló follows a vivid succession of strange images that eventually lead to the emergence of the central story about a charismatic police officer on a tireless quest for the truth, though he must fight against virtually everyone and is just as fallible as the next person. Tabló makes a statement on the issue of race and racism - or, indeed, relations between any minority and majority.
Chickenhead
It is a tragedy, set among low-lifes on the outskirts of Budapest. Dramatic Exchange describes it as "Widely considered to be the most important Hungarian play of the last 20 years". The odd title of the play refers in the first instance to the chicken heads that an old woman feeds to her cat. However, it can also be taken to refer more broadly to the obtuse behaviour of the main characters in the play. The play is an odd mixture of pathos and nihilism, written against the bleak background of Stalinist totalitarianism from which Hungary was emerging. As with much modern drama, there is no hero in the play. The only noble behaviour that one can find belongs to one of the characters in the past, when he was a child, but he is no longer as he was. The hint that what once existed might be achieved again is the only faint ray of hope in a very bleak view of the human condition.
Narcissus and Psyche
7.3/10
Narcisus and Psyche is based on a novel by Sandor Weores which was adapted by Vilmos Csaplar and director Gabor Body for a feature-length film. Borrowing the character of Psyche from mythology and placing her in Europe in the 19th century, the authors give her a "modern" life. She is an attractive young woman - and remains so throughout the film, in spite of one hardship after another. Psyche is libidinous, and her prurient interests shock her staid contemporaries.
Death Waltz
5.2/10
From a policewoman broken leg seems completely slip out of the soil. Life-threatening love triangle mixed with her husband and their criminal friends.
Jadviga's Pillow
5.9/10
That Lovely Green Grass
7.8/10
Misu is spending his summer holiday in an old block of flats in Budapest. The caretaker of the house, Poldi, a park attendant by occupation, is going to retire in a few days and he is afraid to think ahead of the years to come without grass and trees. An idea comes to Misu to spend the summer in an active way. He organises a working party to sod the inner court of the block of flats they live in. To achieve his plan, he has to make alliances with some people and to win the opponent to the idea, namely Kamilla, an insurance consultant. Their assistants in this mission will be the dustman and the coal deliverer and Piroska, a girl spending her holyday at Kamilla's.
We Never Die!
7.6/10
This story has a horse-race fan main character who sells clothes-hangers On one trip, a young, teenager boy relative goes with him. They have a lot of adventures as they become friends. Girls, dance and horse-racing are the themes while they sell the clothes-hangers this summer...
Übü király
Tolerance
The unskilled, jack-of-all-trades András and his wife, Éva are put in jail for serial work-place thefts, -committed in order to try to ensure a normal living standard for his family - and for aggravated assault committed for self-defence, respectively. Their two small children are put in state care, then given to foster parents. András, still in prison, commits everything to help the released Éva get hold of an apartment and get their children back so that when he will have served his term the family could be together again.
The Philadelphia Attraction
7.2/10
As a last chance in his career, the young acrobat with a broken leg, Sajek Oszkár, attempts to obtain the wonderful secret from the retired old artist, Uncle Binder Lipi, a secret which was a world hit.
Bányató
6.5/10
Wall Driller
6.6/10
The sad tale of a proletarian malcontent ensconced in a monstrously depressing housing project who—even less effectually than the heroes of Bald-Dog Rock—attempts to change his life. Purchasing a power drill and slinging it across his shoulder like the anti-hero of a spaghetti western, he turns entrepreneur, boring holes in his neighbors’ walls so that they can hang mirrors or pictures.
A fantasztikus nagynéni
7.7/10
Professor Vidor Minorka's Great Day
5.9/10
Hungarian family film.
