The swansong of the great Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini (La dolce vita, 8½), The Voice of the Moon emerged without fanfare: it played the Cannes Film Festival out of competition after its Italian premiere and failed to secure distribution in North America and the UK. This new restoration from the original negative seeks to right that wrong and provide the film with a second chance…Read More »
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In this Finnish comedy, which features all-English dialogue and nary a Scandanavian in it, Henri Boulanger (Jean-Pierre Leaud), is a colorless English civil servant, who was given a speedy retirement when his agency was “privatized,” complete with a gold watch. His life is so barren that removing even the empty activities of his job makes it not worth living, so he attempts suicide by sticking his head in a gas oven – just as a gas service strike gets underway. Frustrated, he takes his savings from the bank and heads off to hire a contract killer to take his life from him. Then he really begins to enjoy life – so much so, that now he wants to avoid his imminent demise. —Clarke Fountain, RoviRead More »
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Aki Kaurismäki’s first feature, Crime And Punishment (1983), updated and transplanted Dostoyevsky’s novel to present day Finland. Since then, the deadpan auteur has written, directed and edited some 20 films, which is about a fifth of Finland’s cinematic output since the Eighties. His films, however, have always proven more popular abroad than at home. Apart from Britain, few nations like to see their own follies, iniquities and all-round miserabilism being paraded in affectionately mocking entertainments, and Kaurismäki’s focus is very much on the dark absurdities of his motherland’s down-and-outs, drunks and dispossessed.Read More »
Chicken Ranch is a 1983 documentary film by Nick Broomfield about the famous legalised brothel, the Chicken Ranch, in Pahrump, Nevada. Photographed by Sandi Sissel. The documentary, which remains purely observational for the most part, depicts the prostitutes as likeable characters often looking for a way out of the remote location where the brothel is situated. The film shows the girls lining up for potential clients, joking about their job, and interacting with one another within the brothel. The film ends with one girl, Mandy, being fired from the ranch.Read More »
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In Goran Dukic’s Wristcutters: A Love Story, limbo is imagined as a place where no one ever smiles, where furnishings and cars all seem second-hand, where the colours are all drab and faded. “Everything’s the same here,” as one character puts it, “but it’s just a little worse.”Read More »
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An adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s novel, set in modern Helsinki. Slaughterhouse worker Rahikainen murders a man, and is forced to live with the consequences of his actions.
Aki Kaurismäki’s narrative directorial debut. He chose this project after reading François Truffaut’s interview with Alfred Hitchcock, where Hitchcock claimed Crime and Punishment was the one book he would never adapt, because “it would be to difficult.” Kaurismäki later admitted it was too difficult.Read More »
TV Guide writes:
Gowan McGland (Tom Conti) is a Scottish poet who is finding life something of a burden since his inspiration evaporated about five years ago. Now he is reduced to performing readings of his work to groups of adoring middle-aged women and bored college students, doing his best to take away the pain by sleeping with as many of his female fans as possible and drinking himself into a stupor. At the moment he is living in New England where his readings have gone down well, and his list of conquests has grown – but what if McGland were to actually fall in love, would that make him a changed man?Read More »
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Stan, screeplay writer, had his time of glory in Hollywood. Today, alcoholic with a certain envy for suicide, his only link to life is his daughter, Charlotte.Read More »
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The story of Stan, a misunderstood poet, who makes a living teaching English to schoolchildren while writing a screenplay on the side.Read More »