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As young children, Otto (Fele Martínez) and Ana (Najwa Nimri) become best friends, leading to the marriage of Ana’s mother, Olga (Maru Valdiviesio), to Otto’s father, Álvaro (Nancho Novo). When Otto and Ana become teenagers, they begin a sexual relationship, which they hide from their parents. The two fall deeply in love and seem destined to spend the rest of their lives together. However, their relationship is tested when Otto’s mother dies and the two are separated.Read More »
After being banned from South Africa thirty years earlier for his reporting during the apartheid era, award winning filmmaker and journalist John Pilger goes back with Alan Lowey to witness the benefits that democracy has brought to its people. Pilger questions to what extent has the black majority benefited from the democratic changes in comparison to the white minority.Read More »
I could be bounded in a nutshell and call myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams…
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Hamlet is a 1996 film version of William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, adapted for the screen and directed by Kenneth Branagh, who also stars in the titular role as Prince Hamlet. The film also features Derek Jacobi as King Claudius, Julie Christie as Queen Gertrude, Kate Winslet as Ophelia, Michael Maloney as Laertes, Richard Briers as Polonius, and Nicholas Farrell as Horatio. Other notable appearances include Robin Williams, Gérard Depardieu, Jack Lemmon, Billy Crystal, Rufus Sewell, Charlton Heston, Richard Attenborough, Judi Dench, John Gielgud and Ken Dodd.Read More »
Chili-born Italian director Marco Bechis’s second feature is a political drama based on his experiences with the military regime of Argentina (1976-1980) when he lived there. Maria (Antonella Costa) is a militant activist in an organization that is fighting the oppressive dictatorship. She teaches reading and writing in the suburbs of Buenos Aires in an area of shantytowns. She lives in a decrepit rooming house with her mother Diane (Dominique Sanda), who rents out some rooms. One of the lodgers, a shy young man named Felix (Carlos Echeverria), is in love with Maria. He seems to have come from nowhere and is supposed to be working in a garage. One morning, Maria is kidnapped by a military squad in civilian clothes in front of her mother and is taken to the garage ‘Olimpo,’ one of the many well-known torture places in the city, which operate to the general indifference of the inhabitants. Tigre, the head of the center (Enrique Pineyro) appoints their best man ? Felix ? to the job of making Maria talk. Felix is overcome by his feelings for Maria, but Maria is determined to exploit the situation for her survival. Tender love scenes between Maria and Felix enhance the story, but the intensity never reaches the heights of some of the classics of the world cinema with a similar theme, such as The Night Porter. Bechis exerts too much control over his characters and narrative to allow an emotional rupture. 52nd Cannes Film Festival, 1999. Read More »
Rosie and Vincent know each other for ten years, and are married for five. She doesn’t like her job, he isn’t too pleased working with her dad. They’re trying to have a baby. One morning Benoit, a Frenchman and former pen pal of Rosie, whom she never met, comes to visit. Did Rosie love him? Does she love him now?Read More »
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Jack Manfred is the antithesis of a garret-starving artist. He hasn’t a romantic bone in his body. He’s an unpublished novelist, with a cynical view of the world, coming to terms with having an ex-policewoman girlfriend (Gina McKee), who loves the idea of being-with-a-writer, while suffering the depressive side-effects of self-absorption. Right now, he has a cash flow problem.
Directed by Mike (Get Carter) Hodges and written by Paul Mayersberg, this is a first person movie. Clive Owen is Jack. The voice-over commentary covers his thoughts, a technique that can be dangerously indulgent. Not here. Mayersberg’s script has the clarity of an open wound.Read More »
Second feature film by German-Turkish director Thomas Arslan (Ferien, Aus der Ferne), and a rough diamond of the first generation of the so-called ‘Berlin School’. Can is a young and smart upstart; he dreams of a small family but the money that fuels this dream comes from the streets. Can is a dealer, he works for Hakan who is supplying the kids in his neighbourhood with drugs. And while Can struggles to get control over his life he sees his girl friend, the mother of his kid, leaving and himself increasingly surrounded by false friends. On top of it, a cop (Birol Ünel, the male lead from Fatih Akin’s “Gegen die Wand) is on his back trying to persuade Can to work undercover for the police. The more Can attempts to free himself, the deeper he sinks into a life he never aspired to.Read More »
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Yekta, 11 years old, is born and still lives in a mysterious, castle-like house, at the shore of the Bosphorus, together with her lame seagull, her spinster aunt, Nukhet Seza, and her grandfather, Sirri, paralyzed and bedridden, following the death of his son and bride. The bedroom of her mother is the place where Yekta takes shelter in, to daydream and hide her secrets. All she knows about her mother is that she had left one day in a little boat on the Bosphorus and that she would never return.Read More »
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From the blurb
Pu was born into a stormy household. The courtship and early years of his parents’ marriage are already described in Ingmar Bergman’s novel The Best Intentions. And in Sunday’s Child the eight-year-old boy is all too alert to the recurrent quarrels resounding through the thin walls of the parental bedroom: his daunting father (a priest) and his adored mother, he realises to his terror, no longer want to be together.Read More »