1991-2000

Synopsis:
This is a movie within movie, which is almost recursive, i.e., the movie inside looks like director Ceylan’s previous movie, Kasaba. It is about the movie director, Muzaffer, going back to his hometown to make a movie using a cast of local people. While Muzaffer is around, his mother complains about simple health problems, his father is in a legal fight against the government for his land, his cousin gets out of his job to help Muzaffer who promises him to find a job in Istanbul, and his little cousin Ali tries to carry an egg in his pocket for 40 days so that he’ll get the watch of his dreams. In the meantime, they get to form the cast for Muzaffer’s movie as wellRead More »

Synopsis
A short, silent, black and white story about life, survival, death; animals, objects, trees; young and old. It is mostly an aggregation of a bunch of good photos which is not surprising for Ceylan who is also a photographer.Read More »

Based on the 1836 novel by Balzac (wiki)

Quote:
Script-writers who adapt Balzac or Dostoievsky excuse the idiotic transformations they impose on the works from which they construct their scenarios by pleading that the cinema is incapable of rendering every psychological or metaphysical overtone. In their hands, Balzac becomes a collection of engravings in which fashion has the most important place, and Dostoievsky suddenly begins to resemble the novels of Joseph Kessel, with Russian-style drinking-bouts in night-clubs and troika races in the snow. Well, the only cause of these compressions is laziness and lack of imagination. The cinema of today is capable of expressing any kind of reality. What interests us is the creation of this new language. (…) The fundamental problem of the cinema is how to express thought.
Alexandre Astruc, The Birth of a New Avant-Barde: La Camera-Stylo (1948)Read More »

Quote:
The Sweet Hereafter deals with the effects of a tragic school bus crash on a ravishingly beautiful small town set amid the scenic mountains of British Columbia. Outsider Ian Holm arrives, much like the Pied Piper, a lawyer trying to lure the citizens of the town into a class-action suit that would allow the mourning parents to try to sate their immense loss with the small solace of cash. Where Egoyan has dealt with emotional traumas of different sorts of outsiders and marginal characters in the past, with this adaptation, he has made a stirring portrait of the effects of loss within a community. –Ray PrideRead More »

synopsis
In this fascinating and unconventional examination of the creative process, an artist near the end of his career finds new inspiration in a young model. Edouard Frenhofer (Michel Piccoli) is a famous and well-respected artist who lives in a comfortable estate in the French countryside. At the age of 60, Frenhofer considers his career as a painter to be over; he says he no longer feels any inspiration to create, and his last attempt at a major work, a nude study of his wife Liz (Jane Birkin) called “La Belle Noiseuse” (The Beautiful Nuisance), has sat unfinished for ten years. Just as Frenhofer has lost his enthusiasm for his art, he has also lost his passion for Liz; their relationship is polite and friendly, but without enthusiasm. When Frenhofer tells Nicolas (David Bursztein), his young protégé, that he no longer feels the desire to paint, Nicolas suggests that he needs a more inspiring subject, and he offers his girlfriend Marianne (Emmanuelle Béart) as a model. Frenhofer is taken with Marianne’s beauty, and, with Liz’s cool approval, he and Marianne spend several arduous sessions together, exchanging ideas and opinions as Frenhofer methodically attempts to create a final masterpiece. While La Belle Noiseuse runs 240 minutes, director Jacques Rivette also prepared an alternate version, La Belle Noiseuse – Divertimento, which runs 120 minutes, features a different framing sequence, and incorporates takes unused in the original cut.Read More »

Zeitgeist Films wrote:
Manufactured Landscapes is the striking new documentary on the world and work of renowned artist Edward Burtynsky. Internationally acclaimed for his large-scale photographs of “manufactured landscapes”—quarries, recycling yards, factories, mines and dams—Burtynsky creates stunningly beautiful art from civilization’s materials and debris. The film follows him through China, as he shoots the evidence and effects of that country’s massive industrial revolution. With breathtaking sequences, such as the opening tracking shot through an almost endless factory, the filmmakers also extend the narratives of Burtynsky’s photographs, allowing us to meditate on our impact on the planet and witness both the epicenters of industrial endeavor and the dumping grounds of its waste.Read More »

Quote:
I saw this film on television in the summer of 2004 while in Oaxaca, Mexico. Soft porn at its most ridiculous. The writer and director obviously thought that they were on to something with the sexual escapades of a college ingénue and her professor, but they should have thought a little longer and harder… The film makes (many) references to other Justine films, so I guess someone has been supporting this franchise. The “plot” is idiotic — sort of a girl’s pornographic “Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark”, and yet it still manages to be convoluted. Impressive. You will see a lot of Justine and her breasts, and you’ll even see some unseemly sex scenes, but your view of the professor seems to have been sanitized.Read More »

An early Garrone documentary in 3 episodes: “Silhouette”, “Euglen & Gertian” and “Self Service”.
In three plainly told segments, the bleak lives of Third World immigrants are examined as they try to establish themselves in their new home in Italy. In true neorealistic style, the stars themselves are immigrants reenacting real-life situations. The first segment examines the activities and circumstances of three Nigerian prostitutes; the second segment looks at the life of an Albanian boy laborer, and the third, of an Egyptian gas-station attendant.Read More »

Dariya the maid getting a boy to touch her large breast is just one incident that occurs when Yohan and Victor infiltrate two families, forcing young Liza and blind Ekaterina to appear in porn, but they are not so innocent themselves.Read More »