An aged and powerful magnate is dying. He offers Laura, his young and beautiful mistress, a birthday gift; a sophisticated display of virtual reality in which he will “come to life” for her after his death. But Laura much prefers that her mother, the Duchess, who has taken her place in the magnate’s heart and bed, dies instead.Read More »
Synopsis by AMG:
After a 14-year-absence, Teruo Ishii returned to the director’s chair with this anthology film based on the works of manga artist Yoshiharu Tsuge. The main character in all four segments is a fledgling cartoonist named Tsube (Shiro Sano). In the first segment, Tsube encounters a dotty old man named Ri (Akio Yokoyama) after renting a tumble-down cottage in the country. The following day, Ri, his equally weird wife (Chika Nakagami), and his two squalid children move into his house. Soon the wife is stealing the cucumbers in his garden while the two kids devour all the food in the house.Read More »
Quote:
The movie was filmed at 152 locations of 24 countries: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Cambodia, China, Ecuador, Egypt, France, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Iran, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Kuwait, Nepal, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Tanzania, Thailand, Turkey, and the United States. It contains no dialogue. Instead of a story or plot, the film uses themes to present new perspectives and evoke emotion purely through cinema. The film was the first in over twenty years to be photographed in the 70mm Todd-AO format.Read More »
Quote:
An inspiring tale through London by pictures narrated by Paul Scofield.
NY Times wrote:
The city of London is not a hospitable-looking place in Patrick Keiller’s exceedingly arch cinematic meditation on England’s largest city. Filmed during Prime Minister John Major’s 1992 re-election campaign, “London” examines a metropolis whose stately old architecture is increasingly dwarfed by hideous post-modern skyscrapers and mocked by garish billboards.Read More »
After ten years away, Jacques Pruez, an unmarried, 50-year-old, modestly successful actor, returns to his home village to comfort his dying mother. His father Yvan, a family barber who’s counting on his “successful” son to support him in his old age, refuses to believe that his wife is sick and insists that her doctors are killing her. She dies, and Jacques finds out that Yvan is not his real father. Besieged by memories of his childhood, the village and the past, Jacques wanders the streets at night, reliving the moments that set him apart from the rest….Read More »
Stephen Holden in the New York Times wrote:
[The film] belongs to that rarefied breed of antiwar movie that adopts a lofty satirical distance from its characters’ plight. By turns farcical and horrifying, it scrupulously avoids plucking heartstrings to portray the soldiers and peasants alike as paranoid fools buffeted by the shifting winds of war…While acknowledging that war is hell, it goes further to suggest it is ludicrous.Read More »
Although deeply in love with her boyfriend – and indeed sleeping in the same bed with him – a schoolteacher cannot handle the almost complete lack of intimacy he will allow. Increasingly frustrated, she gradually finds her sexual appetites leading her into ever more risky situations…
Senses of Cinema wrote:
“But it was with the release of Romance in 1999 that Breillat would face censorship internationally, when the film was either banned altogether in some countries, or given an X rating. It was a situation Breillat spoke out about when she declared that, “censorship was a male preoccupation, and that the X certificate was linked to the X chromosome.” Breillat’s statement was echoed in the French poster for the film, which features a naked woman with her hand between her legs. A large red X is printed across the image, thus revealing the source of the trouble: a woman in touch with her own sense of sexual pleasure.Read More »
Bittersweet comedy about two unemployed Dubliners who open a mobile fish and chip shop. The film is set in a working class suburb of the Irish capital against the backdrop of the 1990 World Cup, when Jackie’s army made it into the quarter finals.Read More »
Nomi, a young drifter, arrives in Vegas to become a dancer. She gets a job stripping at one of the lesser joints on the strip, but soon catches the eye of talent scouts who hire the performers for a casino. She works her way into the cast, and eventually sets her sights on taking the starring role.Read More »