1991-2000

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A well-bred, lovely, spiritual, sad young woman marries an attentive physician who loves her. She feels affection but no love. Soon after, without design, she falls in love with Pedro Abrunhosa, a poet and performance artist. He also loves her. She keeps her distance from him, confessing her love to a friend who is a nun and, later, to her husband. Hunger for her love and jealousy consume him; she attends him as he wastes away. With his death, she can marry and express her passion, but what she does and how she explains herself, particularly to her cloistered friend, is at the heart of the film. Glimpses of convent life and of Abrunhosa on stage give contrast and mute comment.Read More »

A couple visits Mexico to scout a new location for their furniture manufacturing business and hit a cop with their car on the way back stateside. Realizing that if they report it they could land in a Mexican jail (guilty until proven innocent) they clean up the car and return home. A few days later an insistent man shows up wanting a job and insinuating that he saw something in Mexico that he would not want to report, and the couple must make a decision about how far they will allow themselves to be blackmailed.Read More »

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Two obsessive-compulsives, a chef and an anorexic writer, are neighbors in an apartment building. The chef (301) tries to entice her neighbor to eat with fabulous meals. The writer (302) refuses to eat, and this refusal begins a turbulent relationship that forces both women to delve into their pasts of torment.Read More »

A poignant, touching tale of a young man afflicted by Multiple Sclerosis, Go Now suffers little of the sentimentality which often overwhelms television dramas dealing with illness and disability – which writer Jimmy McGovern contemptuously describes as ‘wheelchair plays’. This, and the unusually authentic feel, owes much to the fact that McGovern’s co-writer, newcomer Paul Henry Powell, is himself a sufferer of MS, and based the drama on his own experiences.Read More »

To climb the corporate ladder to success, a guy agrees to coach the company’s all girl soccer team with the help of his secret weapon: his fiancee’s son.Read More »

A small crew films Leipzig 89-90. They interview factory workers, young people, a former journalist, a Redskin and others. These individuals share their thoughts about the reunification, its consequences and their plans for the future.Read More »

Jacob Gronlykke directed this $3 million Danish drama, the first production filmed completely in Greenland, with Inuit dialogue. The story begins with the 1947 ceremonies in which Greenland becomes part of Denmark; Danish king Christian X gives a ceremonial rifle to Greenland’s Niisi Lynge. A half-century later, Niisi’s son Rasmus (Rasmus Lyberth) still has the rifle, but past dreams have gone sour. The alcoholic Rasmus, married to aggressive Marie (Vivi Nielsen), has many problems because of his drinking, and so does his son Niisi (Knud Peterson), who drunkenly kills his brother’s girlfriend and then commits suicide. The grief-stricken Rasmus sets out across the frozen land on a risky hunting trip, and the film’s tone shifts from realism to satire as Danish female environmentalists make fun of his crude clothing and gear. A helicopter pilot lands and tries to talk Rasmus into turning back. In a folkloric vein, Rasmus encounters a hermit, the Qivittoq (Anda Kristiansen), who takes him into a mystical world for a reunion with his father. Shown at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival.Read More »

Myope (‘myopic’) and Lunettes (‘glasses’), both played by the maker, Franssou Prenant, live in Paris and experience the same feeling of isolation and fear of the outside world. Their reaction to these feelings are however contradictory: Myope is a rebel, always out to defend herself against ‘external’ reality, while Lunettes observes the world and eventually accepts it for what it is. From the window of their apartment they look at Agathe and Pierrot, two inseparable kids who love each other, but do not express these feelings. Are they real, or do they only exist in the imagination of both women? The film dissects the relationships between the various characters and reveals the many barriers around them, something that is beautifully expressed in the film material used: Myope and Lunettes are filmed on Super-8, Agathe and Pierrot on 16mm. The coarse grain and the fuller colours of Super-8 evoke an unpolished, authentic mood, while the sharper and cooler 16mm material is more stylised and emphasises the element of fiction. A contrary cut stresses the two confusing personalities of Myope and Lunette in the same body of the director.Read More »

By STEPHEN HOLDEN
In its most unsettling scenes, set at a castle being used as a military training school for Hitler youth, Volker Schlondorff’s film “The Ogre” suggests the stirring cinematic equivalent of a Wagner opera.

As you watch hundreds of adolescent boys being hyped with a messianic blend of heroic German mythology and Nazi ideology and participating in torch-lit rituals and athletic contests, you sense of the thrill of being a boy swept up in the demented pageantry and passion of the Nazi cause.Read More »