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Compline is a night devotion or prayer, the last of the canonical hours, the final act in a cycle. This film is also the last film I will be able to shoot in Kodachrome, a film stock I have shot since I was 10 years old. It is a loving duet with and a fond farewell to this noble emulsion.
–Nathaniel DorskyRead More »
Synopsis
Alexandre Dumas is a widely admired writer. During 13 years he and his collaborator Auguste Maquet wrote together many successeful novels as D’Artagnan, Queen Margot or even The Count of Monte Cristo. When Maquet meets the young and pretty Charlotte, he wants to make an impression and lies to her presenting himself as Dumas. After a confrontation, the two friends dispute the authorship of their books. Which mind was truly behind their stories? Dumas or Maquet’s? Meanwhile, the Revolution of 1848 is slowly rising…Read More »
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Antonio-Pedro Vasconcelos’ Os Imortais (The Immortals) ironically opens with a funeral. The last of the immortals is present among the crowd, the others having died or disappeared over the years. The man being buried, however, is the policeman who found out about the criminal secrets of the immortals. This is an intriguing start for a mediocre film, in which this tongue-in-cheek sort of cleverness is reserved for the opening scene only. The “immortals” are a group of Portuguese war veterans who earned their title in the colonial wars in Africa in the early 1970s. When Portuguese East Africa became Mozambique, they returned to their fatherland only to feel left out and misunderstood. Read More »
A tortured artist is stuck in an abusive relationship with a woman, whose torments (demonstrated through nightmarish scenes of disembowelment) are slowly driving him mad.Read More »
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Recording of the annual Christmas folklore street ritual Krampus in Austria, in which people dressed up as hairy monsters scare the wits out of the population. The accompanying metal soundtrack by The Melvins provides a curious American perspective.Read More »
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David Cronenberg’s “Eastern Promises” opens with a throat- slashing and a young woman collapsing in blood in a drugstore, and connects these events with a descent into an underground of Russians who have immigrated to London and brought their crime family with them. Like the Corleone family, but with a less wise and more fearsome patriarch, the Vory V Zakone family of the Russian mafia operates in the shadows of legitimate business — in this case, a popular restaurant.Read More »
A leather-clad man watches a woman’s apartment before entering it, cutting the phone cord, leaving a calling card, and confronting her with a razor in hand.Read More »
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In this hard-hitting but humorous documentary, director Jamie Johnson takes the exploration of wealth that he began in Born Rich one step further. The One Percent, refers to the tiny percentage of Americans who control nearly half the wealth of the U.S. Johnson’s thesis is that this wealth in the hands of so few people is a danger to our very way of life. Johnson captures his story through personal interviews with Robert Reich, Adnan Khashoggi, Bill Gates Sr., and Steve Forbes, during which both Johnson’s and his subjects’ knowledge and humor shine. And he’s not afraid to butt heads with Milton Friedman, the economist who coined the term “the trickledown effect.” Read More »
A young couple marry in France in the 1940s and the film follows the arc of their marriage over the next decade. As France recovers from the trauma of the war, the wife finds herself increasingly caught up in acquiring material possessions while the husband prefers a more traditional lifestyle.Read More »