1991-2000

Quote:
Bruce LaBruce produced, co-wrote, co-directed, and starred in this satiric black sex comedy about gay hustlers and their customers in Santa Monica, California. Monti Ward (Tony Ward), a male prostitute, is dead, floating face down in a Jacuzzi as the story begins, and in voice over, Monti describes the circumstances that led him to this cruel fate. Jurgen Anger (Bruce LaBruce), a writer from Europe, is in California researching a book on prostitution, and when he sees Monti, he decides that this is the man he wants to be his tour guide. Jurgen offers Monti $1,000 to tell him stories about “work” (which is more profitable and less taxing than what most of his clients put him through), and Monti agrees. Read More »

Everything seems to be going well for Jiab and Wan, a young couple looking forward to their impending marriage. All that changes, however, when Wan is struck by a car and is brought to the hospital near death. When Jiab goes to a temple to pray, a mysterious monk tells him that in her past life, Wan murdered five people, and now is fated to die early in this life. To undo her bad karma and save her life, Jiab must even the balance by preventing five other people from being killed. The clock is now ticking, and Wan’s life is slipping away…Read More »

Synopsis:
Country girl Fereshteh and city girl Roya, schoolmates at Tehran University in the early ’80s, become fri ends when the former tutors the latter to pay her way through architectural school. Their friendship and innocent f un are clouded only by the presence of a young man who stalks the pretty Fereshteh, demanding she marry him. She br ushes him off and the girls feel strong enough to disregard his advances, until one day he throws a bottle of acid a t Fereshteh’s cousin, mistaking him for her boyfriend. Blaming her for brining disgrace onto the family, Fereshteh’ s father forces her to return home from university, which has been closed due to the turmoil following the Islamic r evolution anyway.Read More »

Two teenage girls in a small Chinese fishing town vow to become sisters no matter what. When one becomes happily married to a stranger, the other is cruelly betrothed to the abusive son of a wealthy family. Seeking to free herself from a lifetime of abuse, Hui-hua desperately looks for a way out.Read More »

Quote:
One of the year’s towering achievements … plays with levels of fantasy and degrees of ‘realism’ with a sophistication fully the equal of Alain Resnais at his peak. Lee Myung-Se is certainly out there by himself in his incredibly imaginative approach to the mysteries of the pursuit of happiness.Read More »

Quote:
“The old woman has just come from attending a funeral and knows her own is not far in the future. She is speaking with the young nurse who visits her daily. The actress, Sheila Florance, could be describing herself. She is bone thin, her arms like sticks, her face deeply lined. She was once a great beauty, but now what she has left is character.Read More »

A mockumentary about a young man trying to make it in Hollywood as an actor.Read More »

Quote:
A little-known French romantic drama from the early ’90s that seems to have achieved a little notoriety for a couple of explicit, seemingly unsimulated sex scenes. Here’s the review I wrote for the film on imdb (still the only one there!) when I was a teenager:

When I found this film on an old VHS at the university film library, I didn’t know what to expect. I had never heard of the director, never heard of any of the actors, indeed, never heard of the film.Read More »

Quote:
With Dead Man, his first period piece, Jim Jarmusch imagined the nineteenth-century American West as an existential wasteland, delivering a surreal reckoning with the ravages of industrialization, the country’s legacy of violence and prejudice, and the natural cycle of life and death. Accountant William Blake (Johnny Depp) has hardly arrived in the godforsaken outpost of Machine before he’s caught in the middle of a fatal lovers’ quarrel. Wounded and on the lam, Blake falls under the watch of the outcast Nobody (Gary Farmer), who guides his companion on a spiritual journey, teaching him to dispense poetic justice along the way. Featuring austerely beautiful black-and-white photography by Robby Müller and a live-wire score by Neil Young, Dead Man is a profound and unique revision of the western genre.Read More »