1981-1990

Technical fetishism and trite philosophy abound in Talking to Strangers, a relatively daring American independent film that, despite its strengths, only points out the creative plague in the rest of American independent cinema. Built around a simple gimmick–nine continuous takes arranged in random order and photographed with bravura camera moves and a one-to-one shooting ratio–the film is, metaphorically, about art and the struggle of the artist. Specifically, it is about a pompous, college-educated artiste who tries to find his material by talking to strangers. His type, played by Ken Gruz, is one of mankind’s most despicable–a condescending, egocentric leech who preys on others in order to serve his own need to create art.Read More »

Diplomafilm is a short film that Béla Tarr made to graduate from Art School, in 1981. It is the predecessor of The Prefab People, with the same plot and the same actors, but with some changes in the plot.Read More »

Also known as “The Prison Heat”, this is one of the most notorious and sought-after titles in the so-called WIP or “women in prison” movie genre. Japanese cinema has produced many classic examples, such as the renowned “Scorpion” series. Here, the director of the infamous “Wife To Be Sacrificed” turns his hand to the genre and the result is a Grindhouse-style gem. Packed with many eye-opening and unforgettable moments, the movie tells the classic story of the innocent new fish who finds herself trapped in a world of brutality and exploitation. Fighting to preserve her sanity and her life, she soon finds that the very worst offenders are the ones who run the prison. With no one but herself to trust, she decides to fight back, with spectacular results.Read More »

A husband and wife, drifting apart, reflect on the events leading up to the worst argument of their marriage.

Quote:
“It’s the rawness of the film that makes us believe we are unquestionably seeing the truth.”
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

A heavy going realistic slice of life domestic drama that is filmed in black and white. It’s a followup to Béla Tarr’s other domestic strife tales Family Nest and The Outsider. This one keys in on marital strife. It’s about a struggling young couple’s confrontations and their own inability to freely communicate with each other. Tarr was evidently influenced by the works of Ranier Werner Fassbinder and John Cassavettes.Read More »

Exiled from the USSR, consummate film poet Tarkovsky poured his stirrings of homesickness into this spectrally beautiful, metaphysical exploration of spiritual isolation and Russian identity. While researching the turbulent life of a 17th-century composer in the perpetually mist-shrouded Tuscan countryside, a soul-sick Russian poet (Yankvosky) forms an unusual kinship with an apocalypse-obsessed local madman (Josephson). Tarkovsky evokes the textures of dreams and memories through ravishing monochrome and sepia-toned reveries and flashbacks, while conjuring the hushed and haunted tone of a trance in this late-career masterwork.Read More »

From director Masaru Konuma comes this tale of sorrow and nostalgia mixed with pop songs and feminine strength.Read More »

In Stockholm, on St. Lucy’s feast day, a bandit daringly robs a crowded post office. Within a fortnight, two witnesses are dead. Two cops from vice squad, Johansson and Jarnebring, who were the first to the crime scene, pursue all leads and identify a suspect, an arrogant member of the elite secret police, a man assigned to guard the country’s Minister of Justice. Just as the beat cops think they’ve tightened the noose around the suspect, loose ends appear, witnesses lose their certainty, alibis crop up, and even the cops doubt what they’ve seen. Who’s protecting the suspect and why?Read More »

Magy falls in love with a man she meets at the beach, while best friend Lily struggles with the fact that her single father has begun to show interest in another woman.Read More »

Halit Refig’s film “The Lady” can be conceived as a thoroughly nostalgic film; the yearning for the city of Istanbul in old times was expressed in every part of the film. At first glance, the film was based on the story of a lonely old woman looking for a place for her cat before dying; yet, beyond this, within the structure of the film there existed a changing, disappearing, and even collapsing Istanbul and in parallel relation to the degenerating social connections in the city. In other words, the film reflected the degrading of the spatial characteristics of Istanbul and, human relations thereof. While Mrs. Olcay with an old residence on the shore house full of old furniture was the symbol of the old Istanbul, her helpless search for a safe place for her cat, on the other hand, revealed the new face of Istanbul with dehumanizing conditions of city life. Read More »