1991-2000

Quote:
Audition is Takashi Miike’s neo-Darwinian exercise in terror, playing out like a comfy companion piece to Shall We Dance? before evolving into a torturous freakshow not unlike Baise-moi. Miike devilishly sets up a discordant relationship between commerce and affection when a filmmaker, Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi), uses an audition as a way of finding love. His cohort, Yasuhisa (Jun Kunimura), is concerned with the slump in the motion picture industry and advises Aoyama that only the fittest will survive: His deceased wife’s replacement should be good but not necessarily talented. (For him, only good girls can be good wives while only talented girls can shoot a movie.) The audition is then seen as a bridge between fantasy and reality—a successful experiment (or so it seems), for Asami (Eihi Shiina) appears to embody Aoyama’s every ideal.Read More »

Synopsis
A young woman becomes the fourth wife of a wealthy lord, and must learn to live with the strict rules and tensions within the household.Read More »

Ole Ege was as a film producer and director one of the pioneers behind the development of the pornographic market in Denmark. In this documentary he talks about his obsession with erotic motifs, from 50s striptease movie, the legalization of pornography in the late1960’s, the ’70s, when the less charming hard porn made its entry. Ege detoxified over film production and was director of the Erotic Museum in Copenhagen. The film includes clips from a large part of Ole Ege productions. Read More »

From the Chicago Reader
One of the best films of James Benning, one of this country’s leading experimental filmmakers, is this multifaceted look at the landscape and history of Utah (or Deseret, as the Mormon Church prefers to call it). Benning condenses 93 news stories from the New York Times from 1852 to 1992 (read offscreen by Fred Gardner) and sets them against contemporary Utah landscapes, the shots changing with each sentence. Benning’s eye for evocative beauty is as sharp as ever, and his complex invitation to the viewer to create a narrative space between his separate elements keeps this 1995 film continually fascinating. 82 min.Read More »

IMDB plot summary : When Sofia marries into a Mafia family, she doesn’t know what she’s getting into. When her husband, all her brothers-in-law, and her father-in-law are murdered by a rival family, Sofia, her mother-in-law and her sisters-in-law swear to get revenge upon the family.Read More »

LaBruce stars in this vaguely autobiographical look at a triple-X star-director caught in the downward spiral of his career. Remarks Googie, the art-house auteur who’s either exploiting LaBruce or launching his comeback, “He was actually attempting to break down the whole subject-camera relationship… It was as if he was an existentialist trapped in a porno star’s body.” Well, almost.

Just as LaBruce’s scrawny, hangover aesthetics challenge the conventions of gay porn’s Wonder Bread desire, his newly adroit camera unsettles narrative assumptions. A dense weave of self-reflexive interviews, cynical vignettes, and outrageous cameos by “Kids In The Hall” Scott Thompson and drag goddess Vaginal Creme Davis – along with moments stolen almost verbatim from films like Fellini’s 8 1/2 and Perry’s Play It As It Lays – Super 8 1/2 still manages enough rude sex to keep the whole unruly narrative in your face.Read More »

Synopsis
A talented young photographer, Claire is hired by a Canadian tabloid magnate, Mac Roi, to improve his company’s image. Claire knows that her mother once had an affair with this charismatic man and suspects that she may be his daughter. She meets Clève, an honest 30-something publisher whose company has just been bought up by Mac Roi. Claire is so taken by Clève’s unassuming charms that she agrees to marry him. But when she takes an interest in Némo, a photographer involved with illicit tracking, Clève starts to become very jealous…
Films de France.comRead More »

Quote:
Taking in the whole spectrum of pre-millennial new age phenomena, the bizarre August in the Water (whose English language release title is a direct translation of the Japanese, though is not to be confused with Yoichiro Takahashi’s identically titled Mizu No Naka No Hachigatsu, a 1998 coming of age drama which did the Festival circuit under the English language title of Fishes in August) is a bit of a mixed bag. Thematically, it’s a real inspiration. The X-Files notwithstanding, this sort of imaginative pseudo-scientific fantasy stands fairly uniquely amongst contemporary cinematic output. Visually the film is also a wonder, with impressive use of natural lighting in the bright exteriors, and beautifully composed Zen-like static shots of the assorted esoteric ephemera alternating with rapid multiple-angle edits and abstracted close-ups of the natural phenomena.Read More »

In this insiders look at life in the porn business, filmmaker Dag Yngvesson speaks with both naïve newcomers and seasoned skin-flick veterans to offer a revealing portrait of cinema’s most controversial cash cows. By exploring the routes both into and out of the porn business, Yngvesson discovers that the adult film industry has taken on an unprecedented air of legitimacy despite lingering taboos. It didn’t happen overnight though, and in addition to exploring such lingering issues as sexually transmitted diseases, racism, and misogyny, Yngvesson digs deep to offer a studied look at the progression of porn thus far, and an intriguing look at where the business may be headed in the future.
Read More »