1991-2000

The first feature-length effort by documentary filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, Brother’s Keeper unfolds a strange-but-true story about a most unorthodox family. 59-year-old Delbert Ward lives with his brothers Bill, Roscoe, and Lyman on a dairy farm near the upstate New York village of Munnville. Barely able to function on an adult level, the Ward brothers keep to themselves, ignored and shunned by their neighbors. When older brother Bill dies on June 5, 1990, the authorities determine that his death was not from natural causes. Suspected of a mercy killing, Delbert is charged with second degree murder. Read More »

A documentary about the model, actress and singer, Nico. She is probably best known for her association with Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground – and for her heroin addiction. However, this film is full of clips and interviews with those who knew her, we learn about her beginnings as a model and a bit part in La Dolce Vita, her affair with Jim Morrison, her son with Alain Delon, later living in the UK where smack was high grade and dirt cheap.

There’s plenty of archive footage and despite the above description, its not sensationalist, it does also focus on her music.Read More »

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Recent Taiwanese cinema has almost had a monopoly on the kind of angst that permeated so many European art films of the 1960’s. The anomie that envelops Lin Cheng-sheng’s ”Murmur of Youth” in a mist of melancholy has everything to do with the collision of traditional and modern values in a boom economy. The film follows two college-age girls, both named Mei-li, from different backgrounds, who end up working side by side as ticket takers in a movie theater in a teeming shopping arcade.Read More »

Complete French Title: Veillées d’Armes: histoire du journalisme en temps de guerre
Complete English Title: The Troubles We’ve Seen: A History of Journalism in Wartime

Article:

None of Marcel Ophuls’ films have ever been very easy to see, but for many years The Troubles We’ve Seen (1994) has had a special mystique. To my knowledge it played only twice in North America (once at the 1994 New York Film Festival and once at Cinematheque Ontario in 1995) before vanishing more or less without a trace. Now, it’s been picked up by the intrepid distributor Milestone, who is showing it widely in anticipation of a planned DVD release. Their timing is ideal.Read More »

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This short is nothing short of mesmerizing! Reggio outdoes his “Koyaanisqatsi” and “Powaqqatsi” in this tribute to the wonders of the animal kingdom. The camera lingers, treks, enfolds and personifies these creatures in startlingly intimate detail, all the while accompanied by (yet another) haunting score by Philip GlassRead More »

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“A respectable women should learn from her husband,
She shouldn’t read,
She shouldn’t have her eyes open.”
A poem by a Burkinabe womanRead More »

An ancient, solitary house lost in the remote mountains of the village of Aska, in Japan. Inside the house lives an old solitary woman, whose humble life is made of little and silent tasks and traditions whose origins are lost in time: stitching kimonos, cooking, eating, keeping the fire alight, combing her hair, reciting unadorned a haicai, a prayer on solitude. With music from Japanese folklore and melodies from Tchaikovsky, Sokurov creates a poem in images which recalls a culture thousands of years old and his own feelings of nostalgia for his native Russia.Read More »

Based upon the manga by Hisao Mali, Silver centres around the exploits of Jun Shirogane (Shinobu Kandori), a karate expert and undercover police officer who conventionally has also undergone FBI training in the US. After her family who worked for the Secret Service are brutally murdered, she agrees to infiltrate a group of criminals known as the ‘Viper’s Nest’. The fact that she is also a karate expert gives her an upper hand in the seedy world of wresting that she has to inhabit in order to mete out justice to her family’s killers, adopting the name of ‘Silver’ as her wresting alter-ego and undercover moniker. Standing in her way, is the beautiful but dangerous, Nancy, a dominatrix and part of the powerful Otsunami yakuza family. Will ‘Silver’ manage to escape the sadistic attentions of Nancy, who is and I quote ‘the most powerful and stimulating woman of her generation’ and take her revenge, or will she become just another masochistic plaything for deadly femme fatale?Read More »

Two years after forming his own production company, Jet Tone, Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai released ASHES OF TIME, a martial-arts epic based on THE EAGLE-SHOOTING HEROES, a series of novels by Louis Cha writing under the pseudonym Jin Yong. The film was set in jianghu, an imaginary world with its own views of good and evil. In 2008, unhappy with the many alternate versions of ASHES OF TIME available, Wong reedited and restored the film, working with the original negative and soundtrack, which were in severe disrepair. Read More »