Synopsis A dramatic triptych offering differing perspectives about death and its aftermath, set on a Brittany beach during the late summer…
L’histoire d’un chateau de sable, de celui qui le construit et de ceux qui l’observent sur une plage de Bretagne. Tous ont eu à vivre la perte d’un proche…Read More »
Quote: The first film in Pedro Costa’s transformative trilogy about Fontainhas, an impoverished quarter of Lisbon, Ossos is a tale of young lives torn apart by desperation. After a suicidal teenage girl gives birth, she misguidedly entrusts her baby’s safety to the troubled, deadbeat father, whose violent actions take the viewer on a tour of the foreboding, crumbling shantytown in which they live. With its reserved, shadowy cinematography by Emmanuel Machuel (who collaborated with Bresson on L’argent), Ossos is a haunting look at a devastated community.Read More »
(SIRIUS 6B, Year 2078) On a distant mining planet ravaged by a decade of war, scientists have created the perfect weapon: a blade-wielding, self-replicating race of killing devices known as Screamers designed for one purpose only — to hunt down and destroy all enemy life forms But man’s greatest weapon has continued to evolve without any human guidance, and now it has devised a new mission: to obliterate all life. Col. Hendricksson (Peter Weller) is commander of a handful of Alliance soldiers still alive on Sirius 6B. Betrayed by his own political leaders and disgusted by the atrocities of this never-ending war, Hendricksson decides he must negotiate a separate peace with the New Economic Bloc’s decimated forces. But to do so, he will have to cross a treacherous wasteland where the deadliest threat comes from the very weapons he helped to create.Read More »
“In some ways more obscure and difficult than Jean-Luc Godard, with whom she has collaborated in various capacities since 1972, Anne-Marie Mieville continues to puzzle even as she sharpens her mise en scene. This 80-minute feature from 1997 is the most interesting solo effort of hers I’ve seen, though I’m not entirely sure what to make of it, especially during the third and final sequence. In the first and most impressive sequence, an extract from Plato’s Gorgias is dramatized inside a bourgeois household, with Callicles (Bernadette Lafont) performing various household chores as she quarrels with Socrates (Aurore Clement). In the second, Godard turns up on a theater stage to rehearse a monologue condensed from a passage in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism below a huge photograph of Arendt as a young woman, an image that recalls the opening of Bergman’s Persona.Read More »
“Idioterne is the cinematic equivalent of a knife in your gut. The Idiots is altogether a complex, maddening, devastating, kaleidoscopic one-of-a-kind viewing experience.”Read More »
Synopsis White-tiled rooms, neon lighting; on the walls black and white photographs from an exhibition entitled ,Vernichtungskrieg’ (War of Extermination) documenting the atrocities committed by the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front. Against this background, Ruth Beckermann and cameraman Peter Roehsler have filmed former soldiers talking about their experiences beyond the bounds of ,normal’ warfare. With a mixture of helplessness, impotence, shame, opportunism and undiminished fanaticism, witnesses from that time tell of atrocities such as the shootings of Russian prisoners-of-war, the murder of Jews and abuse of women. The differing accounts of these events demonstrate how selective perception was even in this most inhuman and brutal of environments.Read More »
A snapshot of a young woman who feels deeply the value and vulnerability of everyone’s life but her own. Pica, our hero, is a girl with a mission. Armed with a Polaroid camera, and charming savvy, she is determined to document the existence of young black men. She, like many, is convinced that they are an endangered species – soon to be extinct. Her obsessive snaphots lead her to many eccentric neighborhood characters who force her to recognize the value of her own life and work.Read More »
The story of this film began 16th of November, 1974. When a encrypted radio transmission was sent from Earth to inhabitants of extraterrestrial world… The film’s name Kobrin took from Hegel’s “Philosophy of Religion”. But now, Kobrin granted the ability to speak to the “kitchen” philosopher – Semen Semenych. From nothing to… Homo Insanicus.Read More »
Quote: Cahiers du Cinéma chose Oublie-moi as its no. 5 pick of 1995 on its annual Top 10 list. Oublie-moi is directed by award-winning director Noémie Lvovsky (whose Les Sentiments was recently recognized as one of the greatest films of 2003 by long-standing Cahiers rival, Positif). Along with being one of the most accomplished and critically well-regarded new directors from France Lvovsky has also had her scripts filmed by the likes of Arnaud Desplechin and Philippe Garrell. Oublie-moi is also one of her original scripts.Read More »