1991-2000

When the idea of a film about the tango was proposed to director Carlos Saura by a producer, the director spent several months hammering out a scenario that used dance to propel the story about a dancer, Mario Suárez (Miguel Ángel Solá), injured in a recent car accident and freshly divorced, using a film about the tango to heal some deep personal wounds.

Woven into the dances-within-a-film-within-a-film are pieces evoking the tango as the social glue of Argentinian culture, as well as the music’s function during the dark years under Juan Peron, when tango music was played loud by the secret service to smother the cries of torture sessions.Read More »

Winner of the Golden Lion for first feature, Poetical Refugee is the story of Jallel, a North African immigrant in Paris. Claiming to be a refugee from war-torn Algeria in order to get residency, his life in the country of ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ is one of homeless shelters, illegal jobs, assumed identities and emotionally complex sexual relationships. Director Abdel Kechiche, who was born in Tunisia and has worked for many years as an actor in France, refuses to portray Jallel as either hapless victim or angry rebel. Instead, he focuses on Jallel’s interpersonal relationships with his new community-not ghettoized North Africans, but an eclectic group of unemployed French and second-generation immigrants struggling to survive. Here, it is the wounded who heal the wounded, and Jallel, in spite of his own traumas, becomes a healing force for the emotionally troubled women whose lives intermingle with his. With superb performances by Sami Bouajila (Bye Bye), Aure Atika and Elodie Bouchez (The Dream Life of Angels), Poetical Refugee offers a moving and tender portrayal of life on the margins.Read More »

One of the greatest film-making documentaries of all time!

Vittorio Storaro talks about his work, along with collaborators like Warren Beatty and Bernardo Bertolucci and peers like Nestor Almendros. On-set footage from Dick Tracy and The Sheltering Sky. Storaro explains his zany theories about light and colour, and gives a potted history of lighting in the cinema. Sublime.Read More »

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Legendary director Ingmar Bergman rarely gives interviews, but in 1999 he made an exception for journalist Malou von Sivers of TV4 International Sweden. Together with his best friend and frequent collaborator, the renowned Swedish actor Erland Josephson, Bergman discusses life, death, and love in this charged and highly candid interview.Read More »

After his wife, Alice, tells him about her sexual fantasies, William Harford sets out for a night of sexual adventure. After several less than successful encounters, he meets an old friend, Nick Nightingale – now a musician – who tells him of strange sex parties when he is required to play the piano blindfolded. All the men at the party are costumed and wear masks while the women are all young and beautiful. Harford manages to find an appropriate costume and heads out to the party. Once there, however, he is warned by someone who recognizes him, despite the mask, that he is in great danger. He manages to extricate himself but the threats prove to be quite real and sinister.Read More »

“Dave Kehr” wrote:

Abel Ferrara’s ”Blackout,” a film featuring sex, drugs and Claudia Schiffer, caused a stampede when it was shown at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival. That it is only now receiving a New York theatrical premiere says a lot about what the film promises, and what the film delivers. (It will be shown at the Anthology Film Archives in the East Village for the next two weeks, as the climax of a series of Mr. Ferrara’s films.)

Mr. Ferrara is a Bronx-born filmmaker whose fascination with urban excess and questions of Roman Catholic faith sometimes makes him seem like Martin Scorsese’s self-destructive, insistently undisciplined younger brother. These are qualities that make Mr. Ferrara’s work enormously respected in Europe, where he is taken to be one of the primary interpreters of the contemporary American scene, and virtually unknown in the United States, where it can seem arty, self-indulgent and wholly unreal.Read More »

A Documentary in 10 parts covering the filmmaking of Kurosawa around the theme of making the perfect movie or as he says: A Beautyful Movie.

Kurosawa on filmmaking.

Chapter 1 – The seed of a film
Chapter 2 – Screenplays
Chapter 3 – Storyboards
Chapter 4 – Filming
Chapter 5 – Lighting
Chapter 6 – Production design
Chapter 7 – Costumes
Chapter 8 – Editing
Chapter 9 – Music
Chapter 10 – Directing
Read More »

Description: Based on a true story. The story is set on the sweeping French countryside where Serge Duval, a veterinarian, lives with his wife, Elisabeth and their two young children. One day, their beloved son Olivier vanishes mystically, without a trace. Unable to accept the loss of her favourite child, the mother, Elizabeth, redirects her anguish and guilt at everyone. Little by little the fragile family falls apart. Six years later Olivier suddenly appears again, now as a teenage boy living on the streets of Paris, but is he really their missing son?Read More »

In Welville, at Battle Creek, eccentric rich Dr. John Harvey Kellogg (a historical figure) runs a stylish health farm for the wealthy, an idea ahead of his time, based on extreme vegetarianism, neither sex, masturbation or even sensual stimulation, but laughing therapy and purging the ‘polluted’ body, mainly by exercises, often in open air, vicious diet, his invention corn flakes, laxatives, anal yogurt cure, enemas and brutal mechanical cleansing. Eleanor Lightbody drags her sickly, incredulous husband Will along to the therapy; the couple is almost immediately separated and getting horny for more available members of the opposite sex. Kellogs stubbornly willful adopted son (among over 30 kids) George is a filthy embarrassment, paid off just to stay away. Charles Ossining panics when arriving in Battle Creek he finds his aunt’s fortune made him partner in the empty shell- health food company Per-fo, not the planned corn-flakes factory; however with a former Welville-employee and George’s name they hope to get rich from their own cornflakes brand. When an electric therapy goes fatally wrong and several other patients die, Will’s incredulous reluctance turns to panic… Written by KGF Vissers (IMDB).Read More »